"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
― Albert Einstein
There is no first hand source of Einstein's writing or speeches that contains this quote. The first appearance of this quote that I can find is in Living With Nature's Extremes: The Life of Gilbert Fowler White (2006) by Robert E. Hinshaw, p. 62. In this book Hinshaw quotes Gilbert Fowler White's Journal of France and Germany (1942 – 1944) as the original source of the quote. It is here that Gilbert Fowler White wrote,
"As I look back over the truly crucial events in my life I realize that they were not planned long in advance. Albert Einstein said, 'There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.'"
The most likely source of Gilbert's for an Einstein quote on miracles would be David Reichenstein's Die Religion der Gebildeten (1941), which was released a year prior to Gilbert's Journal. It is here that Reichenstein asks Einstein about Arthur Liebert's theory that uncertainty and indeterminism in quantum mechanics allows for the possibility of miracles. Einstein replied that he could not accept the argument because it dealt "with a domain in which lawful rationality does not exist. A miracle, however, is an exception from lawfulness; hence, there where lawfulness does not exist, also its exception, i.e., a miracle, cannot exist."
Gilbert Fowler White may have inadvertently invented this Einstein quote based on his understanding of Einstein's conversation with David Reichenstein above.
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