The best way to predict the future is to invent it

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.

The Stone Age didn’t end because the World ran out of stones.

Science and religion can coexist if they are both understood in the right context.

The act of observation can change the observed phenomenon.

Un experto es una persona que ha cometido todos los errores que se pueden cometer en un determinado campo.

It is the mark of a good scientist to have the courage to question his own conclusions.

You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!

We are all made of star stuff.

A man’s mind is stretched by a new experience and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

We are suspended in language.

There is no hope for any speculation that does not look absurd at first glance.

Truth is a thing that can be known and understood, but not easily explained.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.

Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be.

We must be careful not to confuse data with knowledge.

The task of science is to make the invisible visible.

The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems

Accuracy and clarity of statement are mutually exclusive.

In science, there are no shortcuts to truth.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

Humanity will… be confronted with dangers of unprecedented character unless, in due time, measures can be taken to forestall a disastrous competition in such formidable armaments and to establish an international control of the manufacture and use of the powerful materials.

The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.

The fact that different theories stand in contradiction to each other is not a problem to be overcome, but a fact that gives us a deeper insight into the nature of reality.

One must always do what one really cannot.

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. ‘Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?’ he asks. ‘No,’ replies the colleague, ‘but I’ve been told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.’

While the finish given to our picture of the world by the theory of relativity has already been absorbed into the general scientific consciousness, this has scarcely occurred to the same extent with those aspects of the general problem of knowledge which have been elucidated by the quantum theory.

The task of physics is not to find out how nature is. It is to construct theories of nature that will help us to explain what we observe.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we say about nature.

No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.

In the great drama of existence we are audience and actors at the same time.

Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.

No paradox, no progress.

Nothing exists until it is measured.

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

We are not trying to picture the world as it really is, but as we can describe it.

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.

Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.

If you aren’t confused, you don’t really understand the problem.

If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Einstein, stop telling God what to do!

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

If you aren’t confused by quantum mechanics, you haven’t really understood it.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.