Max Planck - Life Quotes

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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
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
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.

Max Planck
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.

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
If we did not have faith but could solve puzzle in life by an application of the human reason, what an unbearable burden life would be.

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

Max Planck
Physic, it may be urged, is solely concerned with the objects and events of inanimate nature, while a general philosophy, if it is to be at all satisfactory, must embrace the whole of physical and intellectual life and must deal with questions of the soul, including the highest problems of ethics.

Max Planck
The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.

Max Planck
Conscientiousness and truth are as necessary in research in pure science as in practical life.

Max Planck