Werner Heisenberg Quotes

The very act of observing disturbs the system.

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

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

Looking at something changes it.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

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.

It was about three o’clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me … At first I was deeply shaken … I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house … and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock.

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

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

Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about the subject. To this I would object that one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them.

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’