Albert Einstein on Truth

"Ethical axioms are founded and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience."

"Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality."

"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self."

"In so far as theories of mathematics speak about reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not speak about reality."

"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."

"It is this mythical, or rather this symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science. Thus, it is of vital importance for the preservation of true religion that such conflicts be avoided when they arise from subjects which, in fact, are not really essential for the pursuance of the religious aims."

"The physical world is real." That is supposed to be the fundamental hypothesis. What does "hypothesis" mean here? For me, a hypothesis is a statement, whose truth must be assumed for the moment, but whose meaning must be raised above all ambiguity. The above statement appears to me, however, to be, in itself, meaningless, as if one said: "The physical world is cock-a-doodle-do." It appears to me that the "real" is an intrinsically empty, meaningless category , whose monstrous importance lies only in the fact that I can do certain things in it and not certain others."