Max Planck

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

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

“The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.”

“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.”

“New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”

“It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.”

“Science…means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but the intellect can never fully grasp.”

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.”

“Science advances one funeral at a time.”

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”