“If you aren’t confused by quantum mechanics, you haven’t really understood it.”

In the great drama of existence we are audience and actors at the same time.

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.

A person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.

The measurement we get when we measure something is not a property of the thing measured.

If you think you understand it, that only shows that you don’t know the first thing about it.

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

If you have a correct statement, then the opposite of a correct statement is of course an incorrect statement, a wrong statement. But when you have a deep truth, then the opposite of a deep truth may again be a deep truth.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.

If an idea does not appear bizarre, there is no hope for it.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Don’t criticize that man unless you have walked in his shoes.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. To group all facts under some general laws.

There are fundamentals of democracy, and they should be understood universally in different countries.

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.

Books are a friend, books are an escape, books are a means to empowerment and books are a means to understanding yourself better and in a world around you. They are everything.

People think you’re crazy if you talk about things they don’t understand.

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.