Werner Heisenberg

"To understand is to extend the capacity of the mind."

"Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought."

"Every person carries within them the potential for greatness."

"The development of science requires both boldness and humility."

"What emerges from contemplation is a new understanding of existence."

"The study of nature teaches us to be humble before creation."

"An idea that seems impossible today may become commonplace tomorrow."

"The power of thought lies in its capacity to reshape reality."

"What is called reasonable depends on what framework we use to understand the world."

"Every scientific advance begins with questioning what we take for granted."

"The universe reveals its secrets only to those who ask the right questions."

"What makes us human is not our knowledge, but our capacity to wonder."

"The path to understanding requires the courage to admit what we do not know."

"Nature speaks in mathematics, but the language is not mathematical; it is symbolic."

"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 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."

"Physics is really nothing more than a sophisticated version of childhood games."

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

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

"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence—but we cannot remain silent about what matters most."

"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 oneself from being drawn into legal difficulties, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine."

"I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato."

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

"Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense."

"The development of quantum mechanics has shown that the attitudes of the nineteenth century towards nature were naïve."

"What is real? It seems to me that I should define the real as that which makes a difference."