Albert Einstein, scientist, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence”

While science has answered many seemingly unsolvable mysteries, life and the universe still remain full of endless wonders to contemplate. The fact that we have be able to attain the knowledge that we have today and continue to discover new truths about existence is thanks to people’s undying curiosity.

The desire to unravel nature’s riddles helped drive people like the celebrated German physicist Albert Einstein to come up with his Theory of Relativity. He labored for years using thought experiments to resolve fundamental conflicts in physics.

“Never lose a holy curiosity”

Einstein told LIFE magazine editor William Miller during an interview not long before he died in April 1955 that “the important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.” From his own experience, Einstein knew that some questions are so big that they require time and patience to answer them.

“One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day,” Einstein said. “Never lose a holy curiosity.”

Einstein isn’t the only talented mind to express the idea that staying curious is fundamental to making leaps in human knowledge and understanding. Fellow German physicist Max Planck, whose work directly influenced Einstein, once said: “He who has gone so far as to stop being confused, has also stopped working.”

While Einstein did receive a Nobel Prize in Physics, it wasn’t for his Theory of Relativity. Instead, he was awarded the honor for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. That didn’t hinder him from making more breakthrough discoveries in the following years. Nor did he ever gave up trying to unify gravity and electromagnetic forces into a single theoretical framework until his last breath.

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