Heisenberg, Werner

"The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

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

"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 task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees."

"I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas."

"Uncertainty is not something we impose upon nature; it is something nature imposes upon us."

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

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die."

"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science."

"What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes there a universe for us to discover?"

"Physics is really nothing more than a sophisticated version of child's play."

"In the end, man only learns by the terrible discipline of reality."

"I believe that the present phase of industrial civilization is leading the world toward the abyss."

"The transition from the physics of Newton to the physics of Einstein is a good example of the way in which scientific advances are made."

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

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to prevent one's being cast into prison. But anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"Nature is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

"The reality we can put into words is never the whole reality."

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because in the end we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."

"I think that the existence of antimatter is a great triumph for the theory of relativity."

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

"The physicist only has to answer the question: what can I observe? He has nothing to do with the question: what is real?"

"All science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

"Change is the only constant in life."

"The goal of science is not the compilation of inventories of unrelated facts, but the creation of a coherent understanding of the world."

"I understand only those questions which can be answered by actual, concrete experience and actual, concrete facts."

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing, but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing."