Albert Einstein Quotes

Einstein, stop telling God what to do!

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

You believe in a God who plays dice, I in complete law and order.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one whoobeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word "accident" makes sense.

The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

In vain people busy themselves with finding any good of man's own in his will. For any mixture of the power of freewill that men strive to mingle with God's grace is nothing but a corruption of grace. It is just as if one were to dilute wine with muddy, bitter water.

Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation.

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.

Everything that happens, happens of necessity.

If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit a person's freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

God's is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.

I don't believe in coincidences.

On any occasion when one can discover the cause of events, one should not resort to the gods.