The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Sunday at Hampstead (1863–65), part X
Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 100.
Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 78 - 79
Context: Earlier, I have cautioned you against an outright pragmatist approach. Now I am cautioning you against an outright populist approach. Sometimes a populist decision is, in the long run, not beneficial to the masses. Neither pragmatism nor populism are fundamental political and socio-economic doctrines. Nor do I say that you should play it by ear. I have made this melancholy analysis in anguish. My jail surroundings have not influenced my objectivity. I do not want to see the whole world in a death-cell merely because I am in a death cell. I do not say that the High Court has pronounced a death sentence on the world because a law court has pronounced a perverse death sentence on me. I would be the happiest man if the gloomy winter of mankind were to give way to a shaft of sunlight and to coloured flowers. The world is very beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever". There is the beauty of the landscape, of the tall mountain, the green plains, the humped deserts. There is the beauty of the flowers and the forests, of the azure oceans and the meandering rivers. There is the splendour of architecture, the magnificence of music, and the sparkle of the dance. Above all, there is the beauty of man and woman, the most perfect creations of God.
“Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens and the moral universe within.”
If Einstein said this, he was almost certainly quoting philosopher Immanuel Kant's words from the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), translated in Paul Guyer's The Cambridge Companion to Kant ( p. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=pYE5rVzrPNgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false) as: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
Misattributed
By Still Waters (1906)
from "The Successes of Air Balloons in the XIX Century", 1901 http://www.informatics.org/museum/tsilbio.html
Chick tracts, " Why Should I? http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1079/1079_01.asp" (2012)
