Werner Heisenberg Quotes

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

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

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

The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.

Looking at something changes it.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

"Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain."

When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity ? And why turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.

[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about the subject. To this I would object that one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

The very act of observing disturbs the system.

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

Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.

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.

The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.

Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.

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

What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.

Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.