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 pointl...”

“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...”

“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 advanc...”

“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.”

“The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.”

“Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes...”

“Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.”

“One evening I reached the point where I was ready to determine the individual terms in the energy table, or, as we put it today, in the energy matrix, by what would now be considered an extremely c...”

“In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas — and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.”