“Science advances funeral by funeral.”

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.

We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.

This is one of man’s oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature’s laws?

Science advances one funeral at a time.

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.

It is never possible to predict a physical occurrence with unlimited precision.

These sharp edges you left behind, they cut so deep; and I guess maybe I am just not dying enough.

Nothing is born, nothing dies.

And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

For next to Death is Sleepe to be compared; Therefore his house is unto his annext: Here Sleepe, ther Richesse, and hel-gate them both betwext.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.