Albert Einstein

The quotes that circulate online — about curiosity, about imagination, about God not playing dice — come from a man who spent his working life doing physics and, alongside it, writing about science, education and the human spirit. That second body of work is why he keeps turning up in motivational feeds: essays and letters that show a thinker who valued simplicity and clarity, and who was willing to argue in plain language about what science is for.

The physics came first. Working as a patent clerk in Bern, he published the 1905 papers that introduced special relativity and the light-quantum hypothesis. E = mc² set out the relationship between mass and energy. Over the following decade he developed general relativity, recasting gravity as the curvature of spacetime rather than a force, and the 1919 solar eclipse expedition confirmed his prediction about the deflection of starlight — the moment that made him famous well beyond physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. His work underpinned quantum theory even though he remained sceptical of the quantum orthodoxy that grew out of it.

Born in Ulm in 1879, he taught and researched in Zurich, Prague and Berlin. As political extremism rose in Germany he spoke against nationalism and anti-Semitism, which made him a target as much as a moral voice, and in 1933 he emigrated to the United States and joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He backed the Allied war effort while warning about the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and afterwards argued for international cooperation, world law and responsible science. He corresponded widely with philosophers, mathematicians and statesmen. Late in life he was still chasing a unified field theory he never proved.

He died in 1955. The scientific legacy runs through cosmology, GPS technology and high-energy physics; the other legacy is the letters and popular writings, kept in museums and archives, that students and colleagues remembered alongside his generosity in conversation. He played the violin, sailed, and prized independent thought — which is roughly the reason his words still get quoted by people who have never read a line of his mathematics.