Max Planck Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

Long and tedious reflection cannot enable us to shape our decisions and attitudes properly; only that definite and clear instruction which we gain can form a direct inner link to God. This instruction alone is able to give us the inner firmness and lasting peace of mind which must be regarded as the highest boon in life. And if we ascribe to God, in addition to His omnipotence and omniscience, also the attributes of goodness and love, recourse to Him produces an increased feeling of safety and happiness in the human being thirsting for solace. Against this conception not even the slightest objection can be raised from the point of natural science, for as we pointed it out before, questions of ethics are entirely outside of its realm.

Max Planck
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.

Max Planck
The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.

Max Planck
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.

Max Planck
Modern Physics impresses us particularly with the truth of the old doctrine which teaches that there are realities existing apart from our sense-perceptions, and that there are problems and conflicts where these realities are of greater value for us than the richest treasures of the world of experience.

Max Planck
There is scarcely a scientific axiom that is not nowadays denied by somebody. And at the same time almost any nonsensical theory that may be put forward in the name of science would be almost sure to find believers and disciples.

Max Planck
Experimenters are the shocktroops of science.

Max Planck
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.

Max Planck
It is only when we have planted our feet on the firm ground which can be won only with the help of the experience of real life, that we have a right to feel secure in surrendering to our belief in a philosophy of the world based upon a faith in the rational ordering of this world.

Max Planck
A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.

Max Planck
Compared with immeasurably rich, ever young Nature, advanced as man may be in scientific knowledge and insight, he must forever remain the wondering child and must constantly be prepared for new surprises.

Max Planck
An indispensable hypothesis, even though still far from being a guarantee of success, is however the pursuit of a specific aim, whose lighted beacon, even by initial failures, is not betrayed.

Max Planck
We cannot hope to find what is assumed not to be existent.

Max Planck
It is never possible to predict a physical occurrence with unlimited precision.

Max Planck
The roots of exact science feed in the soil of human life.

Max Planck
As long as Natural Philosophy exists, its ultimate highest aim will always be the correlating of various physical observations into a unified system, and, where possible, into a single formula.

Max Planck
The whole strenuous intellectual work of an industrious research worker would appear, after all, in vain and hopeless, if he were not occasionally through some striking facts to find that he had, at the end of his all criss-cross journeys, at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth.

Max Planck
The second law of thermodynamics appears solely as a law of probability, entropy as a measure of the probability, and the increase of entropy is equivalent to a statement that more probable events follow less probable ones.

Max Planck
Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future.

Max Planck
The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.

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

Max Planck
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.

Max Planck
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.

Max Planck