compiled by Evelyn Ruut
Evelyn Ruut was one of the most respected voices on talk.religion.buddhism in the mid-2000s. A longtime regular who signed her posts simply "Evelyn," she was known for her compilations — posts that gathered important texts, quotes, and teachings into a single document and offered them as gifts to the community.
This May 2006 post was compiled in response to a thread about science and religion. It gathers Einstein's most sustained thinking on the subject, from brief aphorisms to his landmark essay "Cosmic Religious Feeling" (reprinted in the anthology Quantum Questions). Einstein's position was unusual and difficult to categorize: he rejected a personal God, karma, and reward-and-punishment religion entirely, but insisted on what he called "cosmic religious feeling" — the sense of the universe as a meaningful, magnificent whole — as the deepest foundation of both genuine science and genuine religion. He explicitly named Buddhism as the tradition most suited to this view.
Evelyn's compilation also includes a passage from J. Krishnamurti's Think on These Things (1964) on the same theme: the mind that has been emptied of dogma, ceremony, and inherited belief is the mind that can actually see. The Einstein and Krishnamurti passages illuminate each other across traditions.
Preserved here from the Usenet archive as a document of what this community found worth sharing.
Einstein on Buddhism and the Future of Religion
"The Religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and spiritual, it will be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that can cope with modern scientific needs, it is Buddhism."
— Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
Aphorisms
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
— Albert Einstein
On the Self and Compassion
"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
— Albert Einstein
On Ethics and Religion
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
— Albert Einstein
On His Own Beliefs
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
— Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press
"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling — that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."
"The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning."
— Albert Einstein
Cosmic Religious Feeling
From "Cosmic Religious Feeling," Albert Einstein, reprinted in Quantum Questions.
There is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were, in many cases, regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has, therefore, been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.
It is, therefore, easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense effort and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
— Albert Einstein
Krishnamurti on Education and Freedom of Mind
From Think on These Things by J. Krishnamurti (1964).
True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being — free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies — and therefore you can find out what religion is.
Then what is religion? If you have wiped the window clean — which means that you have actually stopped performing ceremonies, given up all beliefs, ceased to follow any leader or guru — then your mind, like the window, is clean, polished, and you can see out of it very clearly. When the mind is swept clean of image, of ritual, of belief, of symbol, of all words, mantras, and repetitions, and of all fear, then what you see will be the real, the timeless, the everlasting, which may be called 'God' by some; but this requires enormous insight, understanding, patience; and it is only for those who really inquire into what is religion and pursue it day after day to the end. Only such people will know what is true religion. The rest are merely mouthing words, and all their ornaments and bodily decorations, their pujas and ringing of bells — all that is just superstition without any significance. It is only when the mind is in revolt against all so-called religion that it finds the real.
— J. Krishnamurti, Think on These Things (1964)
Colophon
Compiled and posted by Evelyn Ruut to talk.religion.buddhism on May 18, 2006, in a thread on science and religion. Evelyn Ruut was a longtime regular on the newsgroup, known for her compilations of texts and teachings. She signed her posts "Evelyn" and asked correspondents to reply to her address with "sox" removed. Original Message-ID: Ho%[email protected].
The Einstein passages are drawn from various sources, including Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (ed. Dukas and Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1954), and Quantum Questions (ed. Ken Wilber). The Krishnamurti passage is from Think on These Things (1964), © Krishnamurti Foundation Trust.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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