By Albert Einstein
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 sometime 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 (and women), 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…
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…
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.
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 most profound 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.