Quotes from Erwin Schrodinger

An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish.

The stages of human development are to strive for: (1) Besitz [Possession] (2) Wissen [Knowledge] (3) Können [Ability] (4) Sein [Being].

In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them.

[Plato] was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it-against reason-as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience.

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you...

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

If you cannot—in the long run—tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.

The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.

The present is the only things that has no end.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were. ...Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.

The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder.