The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

We traced this line to a specific, contemporaneous source: the "Death of a Genius" feature published in LIFE magazine on May 2, 1955, in which William Miller — a former student and friend of Einstein — recorded remarks Einstein made to him shortly before his death. The full passage reads, "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality," and the submitted quote is simply its opening sentence. Our review of the 1955 LIFE issue confirms the wording directly, and the line is also carried in Alice Calaprice's authoritative reference work on Einstein quotations, which places it among the sourced, accepted entries rather than the questionable or spurious ones. We did note that this comes to us through Miller's reported recollection of a conversation rather than a text Einstein himself penned, and that it does not appear in his own essay collections such as Ideas and Opinions — but a named, dated, published account of his spoken words meets our standard for a documented primary-source reference. We found no credible competing author and no evidence the phrasing predates Einstein or originated elsewhere. Given a specific publication, date, and confirmed wording tying the words to Einstein, this attribution rests on solid ground. This quote is verified.