“There is no matter as such—mind is the matrix of all matter.”

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force.

There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order.

I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.

The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.

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.