"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness." ( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science)
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It does kind of make a difference when you discover who said it.
It is precisely this feeling of awe that has made me understand the 'religious experience' so many believers describe. I simply think it's being incorrectly attributed to some 'guy in the sky' when perhaps they wouldn't be so of base if the simply removed the guy part. We have a primal desire to define that which we cannot explain, and it's these definitions gone awry that has led to so much inherent misunderstanding about the world in which we live. Einstein was obviously a genius scientist, but it has always been his views on philosophy that speak most deeply to me.