16 Quotes by Isidor Isaac Rabi

Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, ‘Will it bring you nearer to God?’

Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.

We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context-in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.

There are questions which illuminate, and there are those that destroy. I was always taught to ask the first kind.

You know that, according to quantum theory, if two particles collide with enough energy you can, in principle, with an infinitesimal probability, produce two grand pianos.

There isn’t a scientific community. It is a culture. It is a very undisciplined organization.