Fake Einstein Quotation Paperweight

I recently received an "Uncommon Goods" catalog in the mail and noticed an item they call the "Imagination Paperweight." It displays an inspiring Albert Einstein quotation: "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."


Knowing how many fake Einstein quotations there are floating around, my suspicion was aroused. So I checked and sure enough, this Einstein quotation has been called into question by the few people who have bothered to investigate it (as opposed to mindlessly parroting it).

The Skeptica Esoterica blog notes that it's listed in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010) by Alice Calaprice, but it's in the "Probably Not By Einstein" section.

The quotation appears to have become very popular in the last 10 years. But I can't find any earlier references to it. Nor do any of the people who repeat the quotation mention where or when Einstein said it. So I'll conclude that it must be fake.

However, Einstein did say something very similar. According to quoteinvestigator.com, in an interview published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1929 Einstein was asked, "Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?" And he responded:


"Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." That's a good quotation — and real! Uncommon Goods should have put that on their paperweight.

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