Heisenberg, Werner

"Every new idea appears first as a heresy and finally as a dogma."

"The right way to do research is always the hardest way."

"Modern physics has imposed on us the necessity of revising our conception of reality."

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

"A really efficient laborer will be so tired after his work that he would rather rest than rant about politics."

"What is conserved is not energy as such but the energy-momentum four-vector."

"In physics, there is only the attempt to describe the world which we perceive."

"The beauty of nature is its infinity."

"One should continue reading old books."

"The atoms or fundamental particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities."

"Language is primarily a tool for action, only secondarily a tool for description."

"Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe."

"The desire to find something permanent is a very human desire."

"Knowledge and faith are both essential to human life."

"The possibility of understanding the universe is itself a remarkable thing."

"What can be measured and verified is what we call real."

"In the development of science, the most important steps are always the most apparent retroactively."

"I am a Protestant; through marriage I have become partly Catholic."

"The understanding of nature requires both intuition and mathematics."

"One cannot understand the laws of nature without understanding that they are thoughts."

"The more complete our knowledge of the parts, the more we appreciate the significance of the whole."

"The laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics."

"A scientist's life is dominated by the search for truth."

"We cannot know the position and the velocity of a particle simultaneously with perfect accuracy."

"The most important discoveries of science are not made in laboratories but in the mind."

"What appears to us as a miracle is actually a deeper understanding of nature."

"The universe is made not of matter but of mathematics."

"I wonder if one could make the atoms more visible."

"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control."

"Thoughts are like shadows."