35 quotes
It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.
Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar (1991)
Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.
The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000)
Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.
I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.
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.
The World of the Atom (1966)
Two sorts of truth: profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
Truth and clarity are complementary.
Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism : Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000)
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991)
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004)
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
No, no, you are not thinking, you are just being logical.
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.
Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature (1934)
It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.
The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000)
We must be clear that 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 and establishing mental connections.
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.
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature...
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.