Werner Heisenberg

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

The path to paradise begins in hell.

Science is rooted in conversations.

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

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

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.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

The path to the nucleus is easy to find, but the nucleus itself is hard to reach.

The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals.

I don't believe a word of the whole thing they must have spent the whole of their £500. million in separating isotopes. and then it's possible.

One can't say that one could equally well say that's the quickest way of ending the war.

We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.

You spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that under your leadership everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.

I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine. but I never thought that we would make a bomb. and at the bottom of my heart. I was really glad that it was to be an engine.

Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

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.

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.

It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consists only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms.

Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking.

When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.