Quotes by Werner Heisenberg

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word understanding.

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.

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

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

The single life is bearable to me only through my work in science, but for the long term, it would be very bad if I had to make do without a very young person next to me.

“I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?”

“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 which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

“In a darkened world no longer illuminated by the light of this center [God], technical advances are scarcely more than despairing attempts to make Hell a more agreeable place to live in. This must be particularly emphasized against those who think that by spreading the civilization of science and technology even to the uttermost ends of the earth, they can furnish all the essential preconditions for a golden age. One cannot escape the Devil so easily as that.”

“Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.”