This article was originally published by Big Think, I just summarized to always remember them.
“Undoubtedly considered one of the brightest individuals who ever lieved, Albert Einstein did not become so accomplished in a vacuum. The physicist learned from the best minds of history, as is evidenced by his voracious appetite for reading and his extensive personal book collection.
… phiolosophers Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
Here are his 5 favorite books and writers, as we know it.
5. “Analysis of Sensations” by Erns Mach
MAch’s work included criticism of Newton’s theories of time and space — another source of inspiration for Einstein’s own ideas.
4. “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes
Leopold Infeld, who worked with Einstein, wrote in his autobigraphy “The Quest” about how much Einstein loved Cervantes’s classic tale of the chivalrous knight.
3. “Ethics” by Barush Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Jewish-Dutch philosopher whose writings provided the groundwork for the Englightenment and contemporary biblical criticism.
Spinoza’s “Ethics” is one of the fundamental works of Western Thinking, describing full cosmology and a picture of reality, while providing instruction for leading and ethical life. The book describes God as the natural order, with humans being the “modes” of God. Everything that happens, per Spinoza’s thinking, follows from the nature of God.
This “pantheism” of Spinoza was part of Einstein’s own spiritual view of the world.
2. “A Treatise of Human Nature” by David Hume
By his own admission, this book by an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, that looked to understand the link between science and human nature, had a big influence on Einstein.
- Johann Goethe
Perhaps the most sizable part of Einstein’s large collection of books belonged to the German author Johann von Goethe. The physicist owned the collected works of the author in a 36-volume edition, along with an additional 12 volumes as well as 2 volumes of the “Optics” and another volume of “Faust”.
