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"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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