Einstein's God Quotes

“How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it “a wavelike question” and it appears as a particle if you ask it “a particle-like question.” This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.

And it’s not so much true, as our cultural debates presume, that science and religion reach contradictory answers to the same particular questions of human life. Far more often, they simply ask different kinds of questions altogether, probing and illuminating in ways neither could alone.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“the end of his life, he was asked what stuck in his mind about his experiences in South America and on the Beagle. And he remembered climbing to the peak of the Andes in Peru or Chile—I can’t remember—and then turning as he reached the peak and looking behind him. And he said, it was like the Hallelujah Chorus in the Messiah, playing with full orchestra, blaring in his head, because he was on top of the world. He was looking down almost like God upon this creation, which he had begun to sort out in his own mind as he’d been climbing, as it were. At the end of his life he was asked, “What’s the most extraordinary experience you had?” And he remembered climbing to the peak of the Andes. And then he slept on it, and the next day he came back to the person and he said, “No, it was the rain forest. It was sitting there and feeling that there must be more to man than the breath in his body.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“Healing,” said the poet, “is not a science but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“We know that what we call feelings—both physical and emotional—are caused by traceable biochemical connections. Working at this juncture of physiology and feelings, health and emotion, Esther Sternberg can provide a concrete understanding of the stress response to illuminate questions that religion has raised up to now but medicine had left hanging: How does stress make us sick? Conversely, why might places of peace, prayer, meditation, rest, music, and friendship help us to live well?”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“Science can take a notion like altruism out of the realm of idealism—offering us a more sophisticated view of it than either religion or evolutionary biology have proposed heretofore. But science cannot mobilize human consciousness and human passion. We need simultaneous resources of story, ritual, relationship, and service that spiritual traditions have the capacity to nurture at their core. Our common life needs the moral vocabulary and practices that spiritual traditions have sustained across centuries and generations—of healing and repair, of repentance and reconciliation, of mindfulness and hospitality—as much as it needs sophisticated vocabulary for political, economic, and military endeavor.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“This science presents a pointed call to thinkers and leaders in the great religious traditions, but not to dust off obvious teachings on forgiveness and compassion. It is an illuminating revelation that these will “work” only if the traditions mine their equally ancient and powerful—but relatively neglected—repositories of practical resources to help us see and internalize the value of “the other”—whether enemy or friend, neighbor or stranger.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“Men go forth to wonder at the heights of
mountains, the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers, the vast
compass of the ocean, the courses of the
stars: and they pass by themselves
without wondering.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“One cannot lead an examined life without noticing that all of our grandest objectives—political, economic, and scientinc—are inevitably complicated by the inner drama of the human condition. In this spirit, Einstein came to understand his contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, and other figures such as Jesus, Moses, St. Francis of Assisi, and Buddha, as “spiritual geniuses”—“geniuses in the art of living ... more necessary to the sustenance of global human dignity, security and joy than the discovers of objective knowledge.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“V V Raman’s mother tongue of Tamil linguistically distinguishes between the word “why” as a causative question—the way science approaches a problem—and “why” as an investigation of purpose—the way religion might approach the same problem, with very different results.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“how we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it “a wavelike question” and it appears as a particle if you ask it “a particle-like question.” This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“no intellectual compromise is needed to embrace evolution as ingenious—to understand creation as an ongoing, inborn capacity of a world endowed with independence rather than as the one-act invention of a puppet-master God.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“Einstein liked to imagine Buddhism as the religion of the future, capable of embracing the best of scientific and spiritual approaches to life.”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

“Be”
― Krista Tippett, Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit