1. “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”
2. “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”
3. “Anyone who says that they can contemplate quantum mechanics without becoming dizzy has not understood the concept in the least.”
4. “A physicist visits a colleague and notice 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."”
5. "Every experimental arrangement permitting the registration of an atomic particle in a limited space-time domain demands fixed measuring rods and synchronized clocks which, from their very definition, exclude the control of momentum and energy transmitted to them. Conversely, any unambiguous application of the dynamical conversation laws in quantum physics requires that the description of the phenomena involve a renunciation in principle of detailed space-time coordination. This mutual exclusiveness of the experimental conditions implies that the whole experimental arrangement must be taken into account in a well-defined description of the phenomena. This indivisibility of quantum phenomena finds its consequent expression in the circumstance that every definable subdivision would require a change in the experimental arrangement with appearance of new individual phenomena. thus, the very foundation of a deterministic description has disappeared and the statistical character of the predictions is evidenced by the fact that in one and the same experimental arrangement there will in general appear observations corresponding to different individual processes"
6. “Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.”
7. "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question."
8. “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
9. “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
10. “If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.”
11. "If (..) we were able to push the analysis of the mechanism of living organisms as far as that of atomic phenomena, we should not expect to find any features foreign to inorganic matter. In this dilemma it must be kept in mind, however, that the conditions in biological and physical research are not directly comparable, since the necessity of keeping the object of investigation alive imposes a restriction to the former which finds no counterpart in the latter. Thus, we should doubtless kill an animal if we tried to carry the investigation of its organs so far that we could tell the part played by the single atoms in vital functions. In every experiment on living organisms there must remain some ucertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow an organism will be just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us.On this view, the very existence of life in biology be considered as an elementary fact, just as in atomic physics the existence of the quantum of action has to be taken as a basic fact that cannot be derived from ordinary mechanical physics"
12. "If you have a correct statement, then the opposite of a correct statement is of course an incorrect statement, a wrong statement. But when you have a deep truth, then the opposite of a deep truth may again be a deep truth"
13. "It is impossible, from our standpoint, to attach an unambiguous meaning to the view sometimes expressed that the probability of the occurrence of certain atomic processes in the body might be under the direct influence of the will.(...)The freedom of the will is to be considered as a feature of conscious life which corresponds to functions of the organism that not only evade a causal mechanical description but resist even a physical analysis carried to the extend required for an unambiguous applicatio of the statistical laws of atomic mechanics"
14. "Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
15. ”Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.”
16. "The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
17. "The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."
18. “There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.”
19. “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
20. ”The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”
21. “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.”
22. "Whoever talks about Planck's constant and does not feel at least a little giddy obviously doesn't appreciate what he is talking about"
23. (To Albert Einstein) "You are not thinking. You are merely being logical."
24. “Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.”
