Einstein's Credo

Alan Lightman, in the introduction to Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, writes:

I first began reading the essays and speeches of Einstein in the early 1970s, as a graduate student in physics. Like other such students, the more I understood Einstein's theories, the more I marveled at his scientific mind. But I wanted more from him. I wanted a role model for life. And so, during those intense and exhilarating years, when a young apprentice scientist is living science twenty-four hours a day and desperately trying to prove him or herself, I was sneaking away from the equations on my desk to a park near the university, where I would lie in the grass beneath a certain tree and read Einstein's humane writings.

One such writing is what became known as Einstein's Credo, which you can read
here (the page also contains audio of Einstein reading his Credo).

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.