Quotes from Max Planck

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.

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

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

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

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

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.'

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

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

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

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

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.

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.

Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.

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.

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

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

Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

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

Science advances funeral by funeral

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.

Science advances one funeral at a time.

Farsighted theologians are now working to mine the eternal metal from the teachings of Jesus and to forge it for all time.

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.

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.