Top 50 Werner Heisenberg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

— Werner Heisenberg

Featured in: Quotes About Waiting

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

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

4. “The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.”

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

7. “The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.”

— Werner Heisenberg

8. “The very act of observing disturbs the system.”

— Werner Heisenberg

9. “The ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it.”

— Werner Heisenberg

10. “The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.”

— Werner Heisenberg

11. “Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.”

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

13. “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.”

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

15. “The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.”

— Werner Heisenberg

16. “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.”

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

19. “Looking at something changes it.”

— Werner Heisenberg

20. “By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.”

— Werner Heisenberg

21. “Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.”

— Werner Heisenberg

22. “Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.”

— Werner Heisenberg

23. “We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.”

— Werner Heisenberg

24. “Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time – the two concepts are too different.”

— Werner Heisenberg

25. “The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct “actuality” of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.”

— Werner Heisenberg

26. “The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.”

— Werner Heisenberg

27. “Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.”

— Werner Heisenberg

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

28. “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’”

— Werner Heisenberg

29. “I believe that the existence of the classical “path” can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The “path” comes into existence only when we observe it.”

— Werner Heisenberg

30. “It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.”

— Werner Heisenberg

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

— Werner Heisenberg

32. “The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.”

— Werner Heisenberg

33. “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.”

— Werner Heisenberg

34. “Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.”

— Werner Heisenberg

35. “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”

— Werner Heisenberg

36. “Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.”

— Werner Heisenberg

37. “The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.”

— Werner Heisenberg

38. “The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines the material objects. The Ideas are more fundamental than the objects.”

— Werner Heisenberg

39. “Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics.”

— Werner Heisenberg

40. “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.”

— Werner Heisenberg

41. “Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.”

— Werner Heisenberg

42. “Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.”

— Werner Heisenberg

43. “Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it-more correctly-the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature.”

— Werner Heisenberg

44. “A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.”

— Werner Heisenberg

45. “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.”

— Werner Heisenberg

46. “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.”

— Werner Heisenberg

47. “I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.”

— Werner Heisenberg

48. “Science clears the fields on which technology can build.”

— Werner Heisenberg

49. “In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas- and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.”

— Werner Heisenberg

50. “The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.”

— Werner Heisenberg