Albert Einstein on Humility

Albert Einstein

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I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

The Faith of Scientists, page 153, Nancy K. Frankenberry (editor), Princeton University Press, 2008

Related Quotes

Richard Dawkins

I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered . . . It may even be a superhuman designer—but, if so, it will almost certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed. If (which I don’t believe for a moment) our universe was designed, and a fortiori if the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient advice, forgiveness and redemption, the designer himself must be the end product of some kind of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a version of Darwinism in another universe.

Eliza R. Snow

For a wise and glorious purpose Thou hast placed me here on earth And withheld the recollection Of my former friends and birth; Yet ofttimes a secret something Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,” And I felt that I had wandered From a more exalted sphere.

Woody Allen

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

More from Albert Einstein

Well, I do not think that it is necessarily the case that science and religion are natural opposites. In fact, I think that there is a very close connection between the two. Further, I think that science without religion is lame and, conversely, that religion without science is blind. Both are important and should work hand-in-hand. It seems to me that whoever doesn’t wonder about the truth in religion and in science might as well be dead.