Erwin Schrödinger Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish.

Erwin Schrödinger
The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Erwin Schrödinger
The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.

Erwin Schrödinger
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

Erwin Schrödinger
"Mathematics" appears to be at the bottom of everything, since we find it unexpectedly where we have not put it in.

Erwin Schrödinger
The observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind. … For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy."

Erwin Schrödinger
I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them.

Erwin Schrödinger
Why must our bodies be so large compared with the atom?

Erwin Schrödinger
If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.

Erwin Schrödinger
In experimental science facts of the greatest importance are rarely discovered accidentally: more frequently new ideas point the way towards them.

Erwin Schrödinger
If you cannot—in the long run—tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.

Erwin Schrödinger
We never experiment with just one electron or atom... any more than we can raise Ichthyosauria in the zoo.

Erwin Schrödinger
Like Cervantes' tale of Sancho Panza, who loses his donkey in one chapter but a few chapters later, thanks to the forgetfulness of the author, id riding the dear little animal again, our story has contradictions.

Erwin Schrödinger
But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power — or, to use another simile, they are architect's plan and builder's craft — in one.

Erwin Schrödinger
I do not refer to the mathematical difficulties, which eventually are always trivial, but rather to the conceptual difficulties.

Erwin Schrödinger
— who are we?.I consider this not only one of the tasks, but the task of science, the only one that really counts.

Erwin Schrödinger
Skepticism alone is a cheap and barren affair. Skepticism in a man who has come nearer to the truth than anyone before, and yet clearly recognizes the narrow limits of his own mental construction, is great and fruitful, and does not reduce but doubles the value of the discoveries.

Erwin Schrödinger
No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

Erwin Schrödinger
I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

Erwin Schrödinger
For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and woman have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else?

Erwin Schrödinger
Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two "I"'s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents — their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further... when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.

Erwin Schrödinger
If I try to hold on the currently predominant view and derive the unity of my self, … I find myself with an impenetrable thicket of questions. … Why is it precisely at this intermediate level in the hierarchy of successively superimposed unities (cell, organ, human body, state)—why, I ask, it is precisely at the level of my body that unitary self-consciousness comes into the picture, whereas the cell and the organ do not as yet possess it and the state possesses it no longer?

Erwin Schrödinger
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world."

Erwin Schrödinger
A living organism [...] feeds upon negative entropy...Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

Erwin Schrödinger
How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?... the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness... really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

Erwin Schrödinger
If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.

Erwin Schrödinger
There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.

Erwin Schrödinger
If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

Erwin Schrödinger
You may ask — you are bound to ask me now: What, then, is in your opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of all of them, has any scope or value at all, and that is simply enough described: it is to obey the command of the Delphic deity: gnothi seauton... get to know yourself!

Erwin Schrödinger
Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does "life", but not so mind.

Erwin Schrödinger