The exact words
Where the quote comes from
Many lines credited to Albert Einstein are fakes, so it is worth saying clearly: this one is real. In 1929 the American journalist George Sylvester Viereck interviewed Einstein in Berlin for The Saturday Evening Post. When Viereck asked whether he trusted more to his imagination or to his knowledge, Einstein answered, “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” The interview was published on October 26, 1929, under the title “What Life Means to Einstein.”
Einstein repeated the idea in a short piece printed in his 1931 book Cosmic Religion, where he wrote that “knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
What he meant
Einstein was not dismissing knowledge. He was one of the best-trained physicists of his time. He was describing how discovery works. Knowledge is the map of what we already understand; it cannot by itself tell you what lies beyond its edges. Imagination can. Einstein’s own breakthroughs famously began as thought experiments: as a teenager he pictured chasing a beam of light, and later he imagined a man falling from a roof who would not feel his own weight, which he called the happiest thought of his life and which led to general relativity.
The interviewer himself is a darker footnote. Viereck later became a notorious propagandist for Nazi Germany in the United States, which is one reason the source is sometimes overlooked, but the interview is well documented.
How to use it
The line is a graduation favorite and works for any talk about creativity or innovation. Quote the whole passage if you can; “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world” completes the thought, and “I am enough of the artist” shows Einstein speaking about himself.
What people get wrong
Einstein meant knowledge and study don't matter.
Einstein was one of the most knowledgeable physicists alive. He meant that imagination is what takes you beyond what is already known; it works on top of knowledge, not instead of it.
Timeline
- 1905Einstein's “miracle year,” in which he publishes papers on relativity, light quanta and Brownian motion, partly built on thought experiments.
- 1929The journalist George Sylvester Viereck interviews Einstein in Berlin. Asked whether he trusts intuition or imagination, Einstein says imagination matters more than knowledge.
- 1931Einstein writes a similar line in Cosmic Religion: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.”
Use it in a speech
Questions people ask
Did Einstein really say “Imagination is more important than knowledge”?
Yes. It appears in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck published in The Saturday Evening Post on October 26, 1929. Unlike many Einstein quotes, it is genuine.
What is the full quote?
“I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
What did Einstein mean?
That knowledge covers only what is already known, while imagination lets you picture what might be true. His theories began as imagined scenes, such as riding alongside a beam of light.
Cite this quote
These cite the original source directly, so you can use them in an essay or paper. Always check your teacher's required style.
Sources
- George Sylvester Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929.
- Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931).
- Alice Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press, 2011).