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.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
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.
The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.
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.
The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.
In allem Streben und Forschen suche ich hinter dem Geheimnis des Lichtstrahls ehrfürchtig das Geheimnis des göttlichen Geistes.
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
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.'
No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.
Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... 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.
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.
