"The Need for Ethical Culture" celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Ethical Culture Society, founded by Felix Adler (5 January 1951) (the full remarks can be found in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein and Carl Seelig http://books.google.com/books?id=UppFAAAAYAAJ)
1950s
Context: I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. … The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity.
“Truth and falsity, indeed understanding, is not necessarily something purely intellectual, remote from feelings and attitudes.”
Source: "On Truth," 1934, p. 28 (1961 edition)
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Max Wertheimer 15
Co-founder of Gestalt psychology 1880–1943Related quotes
“Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.”
Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), ch. 9
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
“Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity”
veritas norma sui et falsi est
Part II, Prop. XLIII, Scholium
Ethics (1677)
Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 1
Letter to Guy H. Raner Jr. (28 September 1949), from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1997)
1940s
Context: I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”