I Have No Special Talents I

This quote comes from a letter Einstein wrote to his biographer Carl Seelig on March 11, 1952 (Einstein Archive 39-013, ETH Zurich). Seelig had asked whether Einstein's scientific talent was inherited from his father and his musical talent from his mother; Einstein's self-deprecating reply became one of his most quoted statements. A nearly identical sentence appears in a letter to Hans Muehsam dated March 4, 1953 (Archive 38-424). The original German is: "Ich habe keine besondere Begabung, sondern bin nur leidenschaftlich neugierig."