MAX PLANCK QUOTES

I had always looked upon the search for the absolute 
as the noblest and most worth while task of science. 

I regard consciousness as fundamental. 
I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. 
We cannot get behind consciousness.
Everything that we talk about, 
everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

It was not by any accident that 
the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls. 

There is a real world independent of our senses; 
the laws of nature were not invented by man, 
but forced on him by the natural world. 
They are the expression of a natural world order.

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.

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.

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.

Both religion and science require a belief in God. 
For believers, God is in the beginning, 
and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… 
To the former He is the foundation, 
to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

The pioneer scientist must have a vivid intuitive imagination, 
for new ideas are not generated by deduction, 
but by artistically creative imagination.

Recourse to Him produces an increased feeling of safety and happiness 
in the human being thirsting for solace.

That God existed before there were human beings on Earth, 
that He holds the entire world, believers and non-believers, 
in His omnipotent hand for eternity, and that He will remain enthroned 
on a level inaccessible to human comprehension 
long after the Earth and everything that is on it has gone to ruins; 
those who profess this faith and who, inspired by it, 
in veneration and complete confidence, 
feel secure from the dangers of life under protection of the Almighty, 
only those may number themselves among the truly religious.

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

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence 
that are contrary to the causal principle 
as he knows it will never enrich his science 
by the addition of a new idea.

Science enhances the moral value of life, 
because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself 
in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge 
of the world of mind and matter around us,
and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us 
face to face with the mystery of our own being. 

There is no matter as such. All matter originates 
and exists only by virtue of a force 
which brings the particle of an atom to vibration 
and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. 
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. 
This mind is the matrix of all matter.  

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

What seems today inconceivable will appear one day, 
from a higher stand point, 
quite simple and harmonious.

Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts 
are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas. 

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. 

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. 

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, 
however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher 
who struggles with his problems in lonely thought 
and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.

Science…means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development 
toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, 
but the intellect can never fully grasp.

Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system 
cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts 
and studying each part by itself... 
We must keep our attention fixed on the whole 
and on the interconnection between the parts. 
The same is true of our intellectual life. 
It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. 
The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. 
Health is maintained only through work. 
And as it is with all life so it is with science. 
We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.