The great successes of science can only be achieved if one is willing to take risks.

A scientist’s decisions must not be influenced by any kind of moral considerations.

Ever since the observation of nature has existed, it has held a vague notion of its ultimate goal as the composition of the colorful multiplicity of phenomena in a uniform system, where possible, in a single formula.

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?

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.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

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

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

Science advances one funeral at a time.

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.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

Physics would occupy an exceptional position among all the other sciences if it did not recognize the rule that the most far-reaching and valuable results of investigation can only be obtained by following a road leading to a goal which is theoretically unobtainable. This goal is the apprehension of true reality.

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

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.

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

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. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

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.

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

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature.

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

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.

A new 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.

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.