Top 50 Max Planck Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

— Max Planck

2. “There is no matter as such – mind is the matrix of all matter.”

— Max Planck

3. “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

— Max Planck

4. “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

— Max Planck

5. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

— Max Planck

6. “An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.”

— Max Planck

7. “In all my research I have never come across matter. To me the term matter implies a bundle of energy which is given form by an intelligent spirit.”

— Max Planck

8. “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness.”

— Max Planck

9. “Insight must precede application.”

— Max Planck

10. “It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.”

— Max Planck

11. “Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.”

— Max Planck

12. “Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’”

— Max Planck

13. “A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.”

— Max Planck

14. “Every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.”

— Max Planck

15. “The pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.””

— Max Planck

16. “The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.”

— Max Planck

17. “The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.”

— Max Planck

18. “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.”

— Max Planck

19. “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force...”

— Max Planck

20. “Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism and dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and will always be, ‘On to God.’”

— Max Planck

21. “We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.”

— Max Planck

22. “The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.”

— Max Planck

23. “Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.”

— Max Planck

24. “Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.”

— Max Planck

25. “It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.”

— Max Planck

26. “I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.”

— Max Planck

27. “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

— Max Planck

28. “Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.”

— Max Planck

29. “A new scientific truth is usually not propagated in such a way that opponents become convinced and discard their previous views. No, the adversaries eventually die off, and the upcoming generation is familiarised anew with the truth.”

— Max Planck

30. “Experimenters are the shock troops of science.”

— Max Planck

31. “The quantum hypothesis will eventually find its exact expression in certain equations which will be a more exact formulation of the law of causality.”

— Max Planck

32. “Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.”

— Max Planck

33. “We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.”

— Max Planck

34. “Physical changes take place continuously, while chemical changes take place discontinuously. Physics deals chiefly with continuous varying quantities, while chemistry deals chiefly with whole numbers.”

— Max Planck

35. “Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.”

— Max Planck

36. “Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.”

— Max Planck

37. “There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.”

— Max Planck

38. “This is one of man’s oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature’s laws?”

— Max Planck

39. “New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”

— Max Planck

40. “The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.”

— Max Planck

41. “The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction-that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist-and before any science there is first of all belief. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.”

— Max Planck

42. “Science does not mean an idle resting upon a body of certain knowledge; it means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.”

— Max Planck

43. “No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.”

— Max Planck

44. “There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order.”

— Max Planck

45. “Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.”

— Max Planck

46. “The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.”

— Max Planck

47. “An indispensable hypothesis, even though still far from being a guarantee of success, is however the pursuit of a specific aim, whose lighted beacon, even by initial failures, is not betrayed.”

— Max Planck

48. “A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner.”

— Max Planck

49. “It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.”

— Max Planck

50. “Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.”

— Max Planck