Einstein on the Mysterious

From: Albert Einstein  1930  “What I Believe”

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.  To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot gasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.  In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”