THE WORLD AS I SEE IT

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 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,known 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."

The End


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