120 Quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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

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

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

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

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.

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

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

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.