50+ Max Planck Quotes | Minimalist Quotes

Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.
MAX PLANCK

Death Hands Science Stop Terrible Work
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.
MAX PLANCK

Creativity Death Important Innovation Rival Science Win
The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
MAX PLANCK

Assumption Determination Essence Foundation
Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.
MAX PLANCK

Errors Old Progress Science Theory
Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.
MAX PLANCK

Constitution Goal Human Intelligence Light Possible Quick
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force.
MAX PLANCK

Existence Force Origin Science Virtue
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.
MAX PLANCK

Independent Invention Law Nature Order Reality World
I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.
MAX PLANCK

Noble Science Search Worth
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.
MAX PLANCK

Culture Goal People Place Respect Time
Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
MAX PLANCK

Experiment Imagination Knowledge Poetry
The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.
MAX PLANCK

Artist Creation Imagination Need Science
A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.
MAX PLANCK

Fresh Happiness Knowledge Science
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.
MAX PLANCK

Answer Born Death Greatness Let Go Science
Insight must precede application.
MAX PLANCK

Action Application Knowledge One Liner Wisdom
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.’
MAX PLANCK

Engagement Kind Science Serious Temple Word Work Writing
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.
MAX PLANCK

Conscience High Law Science
Truth never triumphs-its opponents just die out.
MAX PLANCK

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

Difficult Discover Truth
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.
MAX PLANCK

Betrayal Failure Goal Light Pursuit Success
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.
MAX PLANCK

Conscious Existence Fundamental Myself Regard Spiritual Talk
Those scientists who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.
MAX PLANCK

Entertainment Ideas Rich Science Thinking
Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.
MAX PLANCK

Consciousness Ego Human
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.
MAX PLANCK

Health Life Maintain Relative Rest Science Struggle
Experimenters are the shock troops of science.
MAX PLANCK

Experiment Science
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.
MAX PLANCK

Beyond Position Space
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.
MAX PLANCK

Black Myself Representation Research Search Solution
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?
MAX PLANCK

Harmony Human Independence Law Man Nature Old Order Subject

Max Planck Quotes

Famous German physicists