Heisenberg, Werner

"What can be measured is not always what counts, and what counts cannot always be measured."

"The world of perception of color is very rich, and we approach it through the multiple gates of sensory experience."

"In the case of the atom, the idea of continuity of motion has no meaning in the classical sense."

"I think when we think about the natural world, we find that it is made up of waves."

"The division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, is a division suggested by the structure of our bodies."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in its fundamental judgments; in the particular, one should not."

"The historical origin of culture lies in magic and in religion."

"In each age of the world distinct kinds of things are discovered and with the discovery each comes not merely new facts, but with them also new principles."

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

"The romantic faith in the power of science can be compared with ancient religious faith."

"A small error at the start of the inquiry grows into a mighty error at its end."

"Every word and sentence is a sublimation of an elementary process of the nerve cells."

"The task of science is not only to investigate nature but also to create the conditions under which nature can speak."

"The attempt to describe the role of consciousness in the reduction of the wave function leads to paradoxes."

"When we say we understand nature, we mean we have discovered a pattern that relates the phenomena to one another."

"The scientist belongs to a tradition that is sometimes called the tradition of Western rationalism."

"We have learned that matter is not the kind of thing in itself that the nineteenth century scientist thought it to be."

"The influence of the observer on the system under observation has become a necessary part of the description of nature."

"The most exciting scientific conclusions are not logically deducible from the experiments; they require a special kind of guessing."

"Success in science depends on a combination of knowledge, imagination, intuition, hard work, and luck."

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce."

"We must always remember that in physics it is the experiment that decides whether a theory is right or wrong."

"The paradoxes of quantum theory have revealed to us the fundamental limits of human knowledge."

"When dealing with the atomic realm, the old classical way of thinking no longer applies."

"The world of atoms and elementary particles is a world of possibilities rather than realities."

"In the last analysis, the basis of physical science rests upon sense perception."

"We should not assume that the laws of physics known to us today will hold in the future."

"The joy of discovery is perhaps the strongest emotion we can feel, and it comes to those who pursue knowledge relentlessly."

"Science is not just knowledge; it is a way of thinking about the world."

"The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."