Top 15 Werner Heisenberg Quotes

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

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

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

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

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

إن أول جرعة من كأس العلوم الطبيعية سوف تحوّلك إلى ملحد، ولكن فى قاع الكأس، ستجد الله فى إنتظارك..

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.

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but
nature exposed to our method of questioning.

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

If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty — by forms, I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc. — to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are “true,” that they reveal a genuine feature of nature…. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.

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.