Albert Einstein

“I never try to teach
my students anything.
I only try to create
an environment in
which they can learn.”

– Albert Einstein

“One had to cram all this stuff into one’s head, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problem distasteful to me for an entire year…. It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry: for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom: without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry – especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.”

Einstein on the mystical (40)

Regarding the Einstein quote, I found that same quote (only different) in Relaxation, Concentration and Meditation: Ancient Skills for Modern Minds, by Joel Levey (an excellent book). ISBN 0 86171 040 1

Here’s the quote:

The most beautiful and most profound emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetratable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illuminable superior who reveals himself in the slightest details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction for the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Albert Einstein

A present from Alicia Paez
11.IV.97.

“The really valuable thing is the Intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

– Albert Einstein

A present from Chelsea Amberle Fischer
English 4040, Fall 1995

Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hopes and desires, where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to contemplate, there we enter the realm of art and of science.
If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science; if we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art.
Common to both is the devotion to something beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary.

Albert Einstein

[quoted in Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1986), p.1]

•

Einstein – three rules (39)

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.

2. From discord, find harmony.

3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity

Albert Einstein
three rules of work

Quoted in David Schiller
The Little Zen Companion.
Workman Publishing,
New York (1994), p. 300

“The really valuable thing is the Intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

“Whoever undertakes to set himself
up as a judge in the field of truth and
knowledge is shipwrecked by the
laughter of the gods.”

Albert Einstein

Thanks to Dee Horne

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