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Who really said it

Imagination is more important than knowledge

Spoken by Albert Einstein 1879–1955 · theoretical physicist · said in 1929
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Einstein said it in a 1929 interview with George Sylvester Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” published in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929, and it was reprinted in Einstein’s Cosmic Religion (1931). The attribution to Einstein is genuine and well documented.

Last verified 7 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Imagination is more important than knowledge” — Albert Einstein, interviewed in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929

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Provenance

The source

Quote
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Speaker
Albert Einstein, interviewed by George Sylvester Viereck
First published
“What Life Means to Einstein,” The Saturday Evening Post
Date
26 October 1929 (p. 17); reprinted 1930 & 1931

“Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?” — “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” ↑ the popular version keeps only the bold sentence

As printed in the 1929 Saturday Evening Post interview. Einstein’s 1931 book Cosmic Religion gives a slightly expanded wording of the same remark.

Magazine scan (PDF)
“What Life Means to Einstein,” Saturday Evening Post, 26 Oct 1929 ↗
Quote Investigator: full chronology of the quotation

How we traced it

  • WIST Quotations ↗ sources the exact line to “What Life Means to Einstein,” interview with G. Viereck, Saturday Evening Post, 26 Oct 1929.
  • Quote Investigator ↗ identifies that 1929 interview as the earliest documented appearance and confirms Einstein genuinely said it.
  • Independent citation ↗ to Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931), p. 97, corroborates the fuller wording.
Public domain

The interview was published in 1929, so in the United States the text entered the public domain on 1 January 2025.

Fact-check

Right author, wrong words

The attribution to Einstein is correct — this is one of the rare famous “Einstein” lines he actually said. What goes wrong is the wording and the framing.

“Imagination is more powerful than knowledge” misquote

The authentic word is “important,” per the 1929 Saturday Evening Post interview ↗. The “powerful” swap is a modern paraphrase with no primary source.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” spurious add-on

This second sentence is frequently fused to Einstein’s line, but it is not part of the authenticated 1929 interview text ↗ and has no known Einstein source.

The verified core is short and real: “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” from Einstein’s 1929 Viereck interview ↗ — everything after it that you see attached is often either paraphrase or later invention.

Context

What Einstein actually meant

The line is real, but it is almost always quoted out of context. Einstein was not disparaging knowledge — he was talking about how discovery happens. The interviewer, George Sylvester Viereck, had just asked whether Einstein trusted his imagination more than his knowledge, and Einstein answered as a working scientist describing where new theories come from.

In his fuller reply he tied imagination to the practical business of research: knowledge is the finite set of what we already know, while imagination is the faculty that reaches past it toward what is not yet known. He called it “a real factor in scientific research,” not a rejection of rigor.

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.”

The full 1931 wording

As printed in Cosmic Religion (1931): “I believe in intuition and inspiration. … Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”

The 1929 Saturday Evening Post interview phrases the follow-on sentences more tersely — “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world” — which is why two slightly different long versions both circulate today. Both are authentically Einstein; they are simply two records of the same conversation.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Knowledge

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: full origin chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the line to the 1929 Viereck interview and confirms Einstein said it.
WIST: sourced quotation with citationwist.info

Gives the exact quote and pins it to the Saturday Evening Post, 26 Oct 1929.
“What Life Means to Einstein” (1929 scan, PDF)saturdayeveningpost.com

Scanned original of the Viereck interview where the line first appeared.
Cosmic Religion (1931) citation & contextmanyworldstheory.com

Documents the fuller 1931 wording and its page reference (p. 97).
Why the quote is widely misunderstoodbigthink.com

Explains the scientific-research context Einstein intended, not anti-knowledge sentiment.
Albert Einstein (biography)en.wikipedia.org

Background on Einstein, the verified author of the line.

The true author

About Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

1879–1955 · theoretical physicist

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect. He gave the interview containing this line to journalist George Sylvester Viereck in 1929, at the height of his global fame. Einstein often stressed intuition and imagination as engines of scientific discovery — a theme consistent across his letters and essays.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Viereck, George Sylvester. “What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview with Albert Einstein.” The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929, p. 17. Reprinted in Einstein, Albert. Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms. New York: Covici-Friede, 1931, p. 97.

MLA (9th ed.)

Viereck, George Sylvester. “What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview with Albert Einstein.” The Saturday Evening Post, 26 Oct. 1929, p. 17.

APA (7th ed.)

Viereck, G. S. (1929, October 26). What life means to Einstein: An interview with Albert Einstein. The Saturday Evening Post, 17.

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