Short answer: Yes. Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge” in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck published by The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929. The familiar sentence is genuine, but it is usually shared without the two short sentences that complete Einstein’s thought.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Albert Einstein, “What Life Means to Einstein,” interview by George Sylvester Viereck, 26 October 1929
The wording can be read in the original 1929 magazine scan of Viereck’s Einstein interview. Our Source Center record for Einstein’s imagination quotation places the popular excerpt, complete passage, interview details and independent reference together.
Where does the quotation come from?
The quotation appears in “What Life Means to Einstein,” a wide-ranging interview conducted by the journalist and poet George Sylvester Viereck. The Saturday Evening Post published the interview on 26 October 1929. It is therefore not an unattributed recollection, a later poster slogan or a sentence reconstructed from one of Einstein’s scientific papers.
The magazine’s scan is the most direct online evidence because it shows the sentence in its printed setting. A citation in Princeton University Press’s The Ultimate Quotable Einstein independently identifies the same interview and publication date. The agreement between a primary scan and a scholarly citation gives this attribution a much firmer foundation than the many Einstein sayings that circulate without a document.
What question was Einstein answering?
Viereck was asking about intuition, inspiration and sudden advances in science. Einstein described the role of intuition in forming an idea, while also making clear that a scientific hypothesis still has to be tested. The interviewer then asked whether Einstein trusted imagination more than knowledge. The famous passage is his direct reply.
This surrounding exchange matters. Einstein was not dismissing expertise, facts or disciplined study. He was distinguishing two functions. Existing knowledge gives a thinker material, methods and constraints; imagination makes it possible to form a new hypothesis, picture an unseen relationship or ask a question that the current framework has not yet answered.
Popular wording and documented wording
| Version | Wording | Source status |
|---|---|---|
| Popular excerpt | “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” | Exact opening sentence, shortened from the complete reply |
| Documented passage | “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” | Printed in the 1929 interview |
The short form is not a false quotation. It reproduces Einstein’s opening sentence exactly. Calling it an excerpt is more precise than calling it a paraphrase, because the only change is that the remainder of the reply has been omitted.
What did Einstein mean by imagination?
In this interview, imagination is not daydreaming detached from reality. It is the ability to move beyond what is already known and form a possibility that can then be examined. That is why the earlier discussion of evidence is important: imagination proposes; observation, reasoning and experiment help decide whether the proposal survives.
The contrast is also about reach. Knowledge is necessarily bounded by what has been learned, recorded or demonstrated so far. Imagination can consider relationships beyond that boundary. Yet imagination becomes scientifically productive only when it returns to the world and accepts correction.
This makes the quotation useful beyond physics without turning it into a vague command to “be creative.” In art, research, education and problem-solving, a strong process usually alternates between learning what is known, imagining another possibility and checking the result against the work itself.
How to cite the quotation accurately
For a caption or informal article, the short sentence may be quoted directly and attributed to Albert Einstein. When context or research quality matters, include the complete reply and identify the interview:
Albert Einstein, interview by George Sylvester Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929.
Linking to the primary magazine scan of the 1929 interview lets readers verify both the wording and the conversational setting. The independent Princeton University Press citation for Einstein’s interview quotation provides a stable supporting reference.
A second verified Einstein quotation cluster
Einstein is an especially difficult author for quotation research because his name is attached to many neat modern sayings. The solution is not another long list without evidence, but a series of focused attribution checks. You can compare this interview source with our analysis of whether Einstein really said “Life is like riding a bicycle”, where the documented wording and the popular version differ.
Continue with the Albert Einstein author profile, browse the related wisdom quote collection, or open the quote generator with Albert Einstein selected. Generator results are discovery prompts; use the Source Center whenever exact wording and attribution matter.
Frequently asked questions
Did Einstein really say “Imagination is more important than knowledge”?
Yes. The sentence appears in a published interview with George Sylvester Viereck dated 26 October 1929.
What is the full Einstein imagination quote?
The complete documented reply continues with two sentences explaining that knowledge is limited while imagination encircles the world.
Was the quotation from a letter or a scientific paper?
Neither. It was printed in “What Life Means to Einstein,” an interview published by The Saturday Evening Post.
Did Einstein believe knowledge was unimportant?
No. The surrounding discussion connects intuition with scientific testing. His answer describes imagination as a way to reach beyond current knowledge, not as a replacement for evidence.
Source note: This article checks the wording against the original magazine scan and identifies later supporting references. For correction requests, include the quotation, page URL and a verifiable primary or scholarly source.