On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.
Interpretation
The meaning of concepts comes from our collective experiences and perceptions.
This quote by Albert Einstein emphasizes that concepts do not exist in isolation; their significance is derived from the sensory experiences and impressions we associate with them. It suggests that our understanding is fundamentally shaped by our interactions with the world, highlighting the interconnectedness of thought and perception.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality, this quote illustrates how subjective perceptions shape our understanding.
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.
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.
The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.
Trees are massacred, houses go up β faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
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