“Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.”

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

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

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.

Insight must precede application.

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.’

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. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.

Truth never triumphs-its opponents just die out.

A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner.

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.

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.

Those scientists who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.

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.

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

The spectral density of black body radiation; represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.

A natural law; ‘forgive them or become them.’ slowly, unnoticeably, surely.

The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

He has stood for the inclusion of all segments of our society under the law; women, gender equality, workers’ rights to organize, and civil rights for the least able.

There are so many laws that no one is safe from hanging.

The government is frequently and aptly classed under two descriptions – a government of force, and a government of laws; the first is the definition of despotism- the last, of liberty.

The welfare of the people is the highest law.

The laws of circumstance are abolished by new circumstances.