Max Planck Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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