There is a popular quote on the Internet attributed to the Nobel laureate: “There are only two ways to live life. The first is as if miracles do not exist. The second one is like there are only miracles all around.” We found out if the physicist said anything like that.
The phrase about the presence of miracles in life, indicating the authorship of Einstein, can be found on websites With selections quotes and aphorisms, in articles with catchphrases physics and in motivational literature. The statement is also shared by social media users (“VKontakte", Facebook*, Instagram*) And blogging platforms.
Albert Einstein died in 1955, and in the nearly 70 years since his death, all of his known works, letters and other texts have been carefully studied, most of them digitized and published in the public domain. According to the physicist's will, a significant part of his archives was transferred to Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Similar resources with digitized works and letters were created by employees Princeton University And California Tech University in the USA. Despite the fact that the statement under discussion is popular not only in Russian, but also in English-speaking segment of the Internet (in the formulation “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”), nothing like “Verified” could be found in any of these databases.
In some Russian-language sources indicated, that the quote is taken from Einstein’s book “The World as I See It.” It was first published on German language in 1934, and a year later translated into English. In none of these versions was it possible to find the quote being analyzed or anything close to it in meaning.
In 2011, Princeton University published a collection The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, which contains the scientist’s statements. The compilers also included a section in the book with quotes attributed to the scientist erroneously. Among them is a phrase about two ways to live life.
Portal The Quote Investigator, who specializes in researching the authorship of common quotes, discovered that the Nobel laureate began to be attributed the statement during his lifetime. American geographer Gilbert Fowler White in his notes in 1942 he mentioned this phrase, indicating Einstein as its author. One might assume that the physicist could have uttered these words in a conversation with White, since the scientists lived at the same time, but Verified was unable to confirm that they knew each other. Therefore, it seems more likely that White simply mistook the authorship of the quote.
Einstein is regularly (and without evidence) credited with aphorisms about life and science. Only the American writer Mark Twain can compete with the scientist in the number of quotes circulated under his name, but not his own. “Verified” has already examined the statements erroneously attributed to Einstein that “only a fool needs order - genius rules over chaos", "only two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity" And "The biggest stupidity is to do the same thing and hope for a different result"
Thus, there is no evidence that Einstein has anything to do with the quote about two ways to live life depending on one's belief in miracles. However, unlike many other similar cases, this statement was attributed to the Nobel laureate not on the Internet, but during the scientist’s lifetime.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: Archivo General de la Nación, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Read on the topic:
- Princeton University Press. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein
- Is it true that the phrase that in the fourth world war people will fight with stones and sticks belongs to Einstein?
- Is it true that the author of Einstein's riddle is Albert Einstein himself?
- Did Einstein say that technology would create a “generation of idiots”?
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