The BBC reported this week that two notes written by Albert Einstein, including his theory for happy living, sold for $1.56m.
Given to a courier in Tokyo in 1922 instead of a tip, Einstein (who had just heard that he had won the Nobel prize) told the messenger that, if he was lucky, the notes might become valuable one day.
When the courier came to his room to make a delivery, Einstein didn’t have any money to reward him.
Instead, he handed the messenger a signed note – using stationery of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo – with one sentence, written in German:
“A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it.”
As I hove towards my 50th birthday; and find myself this lunchtime, sat with a nice cup of tea, in the kitchen listening serendipitously to Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor on Spotify – I think Einstein had a point…
More of Einstein’s wise words (thanks to the BBC):
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
“We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
Achilles & Aristotle 