Heisenberg, Werner

"We must learn not to think of intelligence as the ability to answer questions correctly but as the ability to ask the right questions."

"The greatest intellectual achievement is knowing what not to investigate."

"Nature has shown us that the universe is far more subtle and complex than our intuition suggests."

"The physicist and the mystic have often arrived at the same truth, though by different paths."

"What matters is not the result but the human endeavor and the method by which it is pursued."

"The development of science and the development of humanity are ultimately interconnected."

"We are caught in a web of interactions with the world around us, and our thoughts are not independent of those interactions."

"In the final analysis, everything is a matter of perspective and interpretation."

"The greatest discoveries often come when we stop looking for what we expect to find."

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but God is waiting for you at the bottom of the glass."

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in his field."

"The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts."

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because in the final analysis we are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

"Every man has the right to make a fool of himself."

"I have repeatedly said that in my view the answer to this question is religion. You will understand that science by itself does not give people anything to believe in."

"Uncertainty is inherent in the very nature of quantum mechanics."

"The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought."

"What we observe is not nature in itself, but rather nature exposed to our methods of questioning."

"Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the quantum mechanical formalism."

"The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be."

"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy."

"Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, but rather the questions it poses to nature."

"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks."

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself—nature does it for you."

"The development of full consciousness of self is one of the last stages of human development."

"What can we know about the atoms? We can know only the results of the experiments performed on them."

"The great tradition of learning through careful analysis of nature should be continued."

"If we are going to have to choose between freedom and security, I choose freedom."