We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Interpretation
This quote warns against prioritizing intellect above all else, highlighting its limitations in the absence of personal values and character.
Albert Einstein emphasizes the importance of balancing intellect with humanity. While intellect can be a powerful tool, it lacks the essential qualities that define a person's character, such as empathy, morality, and personality. He suggests that over-reliance on intellect without the guiding influence of our personal values can lead to a sterile and unfulfilling existence.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a lecture about the importance of ethical values in education.
I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science.
If I would follow your advice and Jesus could perceive it, he, as a Jewish teacher, surely would not approve of such behavior.
I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.
In the middle of adversity there is great opportunity.
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.
When you have emptied all content - thoughts, desires, memories, projections, hopes - when all is gone, for the first time you find yourself, because you are nothing but that pure space, that virgin space within you. Unburdened by anything, that contentless consciousness, that's what you are! Seeing it, realizing it, one is free. One is freedom, one is joy, one is bliss.
Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach.
When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them - your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past - and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.
A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.
I always tell young girls, surround yourself with goodness. I learned early on how to get the haters out of my life.
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