It really is true: Einstein did actually say “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” But unless you understand the context in which this statement was made, you’re almost certainly misinterpreting and misunderstanding what was meant. (Credit: Nobel Prize foundation)

Einstein’s most famous quote is totally misunderstood

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” is often taken to mean that your conceptions outweigh what’s real. That’s not what he said.

Which do you think is more important for your own life: imagination or knowledge?

What about for the life of a scientist, like a theoretical physicist? Is imagination or knowledge more important for them?

If you’ve ever seen a poster of Einstein with a quote on it, there’s a very good chance that the quote simply says, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Although that quote is indeed correctly attributable to Einstein, most people completely misinterpret its meaning.

When you hear it, you might picture weighing “what you know” on one side of your mental scale, and weighing “what you can imagine” on the other side. When the scales balance out, the “what you can imagine” side turns out to be weightier, at least in terms of importance. This is how most people view Einstein’s quote, and it’s almost reassuring in a way: to imagine that perhaps the greatest genius in all of human history downplays the importance of any one individual’s cumulative knowledge set, while instead favoring simply what we can concoct in our own imaginations.