35 quotes
The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.
Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934)
Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions. (1927)
Werner Heisenberg: Die Sprache der Atome (2010)
Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.
I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as "objective" and "subjective" are, a great liberation of thought.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.
Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934)
Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
In that sense, religion helps to make social life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within which our life is set.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Disputed Teaching and Learning Elementary Social Studies (1970)
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
Disputed
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.
Attributed William Glen (1994)
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
Misattributed
Of course not ... but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Disputed