Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom." - Albert Einstein.
I have always found this quote fascinating. One of the brightest minds of the 20th century claims that knowledge is not information.
For Einstein, knowledge doesn't come by thinking:
"I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."
Einstein was famous for his deep, solitary contemplation. He often spent hours, even days, immersed in thought, walking, scribbling in notebooks, or just staring out the window.
He once said: "I think and think for months, for years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right."
This hundredth time, however, wasn't the result of thinking but of "swimming in silence."
Einstein was a genius not because of how well he thought or solved mathematical problems, but because he realized that thinking itself might be a problem. He said: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
In other words, we must die to our familiar way of thinking in order to think differently. When we think the way we have always thought, we keep creating the same set of problems.
