Albert Einstein. Iconic figure, theoretical physicist, recipient of a Nobel Prize. In truth, he received many awards throughout his career; a visionary with an intriguing back story.
You might not know this, but he was also a very quotable character.
Relevant now more than ever, here are 5 popular Einstein quotes for 2020:
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
If this doesn’t sum up many of our home-schooling experiences, then I don’t know what does.
We are all good at something, but nothing grounds you like the inability to help your primary school aged child with their work. Number lines? The jump method? Fronted adverbials? It may as well be the Theory of General Relativity before we’ve had a coffee in the morning.
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
Einstein clearly hadn’t banked on working from home, educating his children, sharing one laptop and parenting, because everything is indeed happening at once, Albert.
Working, parenting, teaching; they’re all tricky tasks in their own right, but doing them concurrently is really something, isn’t it?
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”
Einstein’s theory of special relativity tells us that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. As teachers, we know that the last five minutes of a lesson are the longest and as parents, it’s exactly the same, but with bedtime. Or lesson time. The lines have blurred a bit recently.
Not to labour the point, but the 12 hours that the kids are in bed are a lot shorter than the 12 hours that they are not.
“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”
Particularly pertinent, Einstein lived through two world wars and truly understood that everyone had their role to play. One doesn’t need to have an IQ of 160 to know how to speak to everybody with courtesy and respect, but this quote is one of our favourites because it suggests so much more than that, it tells us that a wide range of skills are needed for a successful society and to just be decent to everyone. That’s right, Albert, we should #BeKind.
“If I were to start taking care of my grooming, I would no longer be my own self.”
Seven weeks into lockdown, I think we all understand the sentiment of this!
You might not have thought that you’d be learning from Einstein today, but here we are. Be decent to everyone you encounter, don’t worry about what you look like too much and everybody experiences parts of the day that seem to last forever.
That’s something that we can all relate to. God bless popular Einstein quotes ey?
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