120 Quotes by Werner Heisenberg

In a darkened world no longer illuminated by the light of this center [God], technical advances are scarcely more than despairing attempts to make Hell a more agreeable place to live in. This must be particularly emphasized against those who think that by spreading the civilization of science and technology even to the uttermost ends of the earth, they can furnish all the essential preconditions for a golden age. One cannot escape the Devil so easily as that.

We can never know anything.

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.

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.

I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.