"How strange is the
lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what
purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But
without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists
for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and
well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the
many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of
sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner
and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and
dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same
measure as I have received and am still receiving...
"I have never looked
upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis
I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way,
and time after time have given me new courage to face life
cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense
of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the
objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and
scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite
objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury --
have always seemed to me contemptible.
"My passionate sense
of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted
oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other
human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and
have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my
immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these
ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for
solitude..."
"My political ideal is
democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man
idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the
recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my
fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause
of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand
the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through
ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to
reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and
generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced,
they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an
autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men
of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human
life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient
individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the
sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in
feeling.
"This topic brings me
to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I
abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with
all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all
the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how
passionately I hate them!
"The most beautiful
experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental
emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel,
is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience
of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A
knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our
perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty,
which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our
minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true
religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply
religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity
and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of
existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny
portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
See also Einstein's
Third Paradise, an essay by Gerald Holton
The text of Albert Einstein's copyrighted essay,
"The World As I See It," was shortened for our Web exhibit. The
essay was originally published in "Forum and Century," vol. 84, pp.
193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living
Philosophies. It is also included in Living Philosophies
(pp. 3-7) New York: Simon Schuster, 1931. For a more recent source,
you can also find a copy of it in A. Einstein, Ideas and
Opinions, based on Mein Weltbild, edited by Carl Seelig, New
York: Bonzana Books, 1954 (pp. 8-11).
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