“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one.”

— Bill Bryson , book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Bill Bryson 112

American author 1951

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“Jesus could not have imagined such an idea as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.”

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“If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”

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“It came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy dog… He never bothered about mathematics at all.”

Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) German mathematician and physicist

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“Albert Einstein quipped that “everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open.” Although we may not have the complete knowledge or we may be bombarded with contradictory information, we can still make informed decisions based on wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil.”

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“I once asked Bell whether during the years he was studying the quantum theory it ever occurred to him that the theory might simply be wrong. He thought a moment and answered, “I hesitated to think it might be wrong, but I knew that it was rotten.” Bell pronounced the word “rotten” with a good deal of relish and then added, “That is to say, one has to find some decent way of expressing whatever truth there is in it.” The attitude that even if there is not something actually wrong with the theory, there is something deeply unsettling—“rotten”—about it, was common to most of the creators of the quantum theory. Niels Bohr was reported to have remarked, “Well, I think that if a man says it is completely clear to him these days, then he has not really understood the subject.” He later added, “If you do not getschwindlig [dizzy] sometimes when you think about these things then you have not really understood it.” My teacher Philipp Frank used to tell about the time he visited Einstein in Prague in 1911. Einstein had an office at the university that over looked a park. People were milling around in the park, some engaged in vehement gesture-filled discussions. When Professor Frank asked Einstein what was going on, Einstein replied that it was the grounds of a lunatic asylum, adding, “Those are the madmen who do not occupy themselves with the quantum theory.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

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“I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take.
Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ….. but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister.”

Dennis Overbye (1944) American writer

On Albert Einstein, in Sex and Physics : A Talk with Dennis Overbye (2001) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/overbye/overbye_print.html

“We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

As recalled by his biographer Abraham Pais in Reviews of Modern Physics, 51, 863 (1979): 907. Cited in Boojums All The Way Through by N. David Mermin (1990), p. 81 http://books.google.com/books?id=bf5bjBk095UC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q&f=false
Attributed in posthumous publications

“Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist — a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

"Bujak and the Strong Force"
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“Einstein was just a genius of theoretical physics. If you introduced him to biology or chemistry, he would look like a fish trying to climb a tree.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one.”

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