87 Quotes by Erwin Schrödinger

Our [Western] science has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. This is precisely the point where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.

I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.

The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.

Dejando de lado la metáfora, pienso que la filosofía de los antiguos griegos nos atrae hoy porque nunca antes o desde entonces, en ningún lugar del mundo, se ha establecido nada parecido a su altamente avanzado y articulado sistema de conocimiento y especulación sin la fatídica división que nos ha estorbado durante siglos y que ha llegado a hacerse insufrible en nuestros días.

There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.

When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply