Wolfgang Pauli Quotes

Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.

That's not right. That's not even wrong.

God made the bulk; the surface was invented by the devil.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

If speculative ideas can not be tested, they're not science; they don't even rise to the level of being wrong.

I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.

It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.

What really matters for me is ... the more active role of the observer in quantum physics ... According to quantum physics the observer has indeed a new relation to the physical events around him in comparison with the classical observer, who is merely a spectator.

The fact that the author thinks slowly is not serious, but the fact that he publishes faster than he thinks is inexcusable.

To us ... the only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality-the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical-as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously ... It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche (i.e., matter and mind) could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.

Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!

You know, what Einstein has just said isn't so stupid.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is "God does not exist and Dirac is His prophet."

When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.

A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, "You look very unhappy"; whereupon I answered fiercely, "How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?".

I confess, that very different from you, I do find sometimes scientific inspiration in mysticism ... but this is counterbalanced by an immediate sense for mathematics.

The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung ... corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.

Although I have no objection to accepting the existence of relatively constant psychic contents that survive personal ego, it must always be born in mind that we have no way of knowing what these contents are actually like "as such." All we can observe is their effect on other living people, whose spiritual level and whose personal unconscious crucially influence the way these contents actually manifest themselves.

For quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says 'universal' it just means pure nonsense.

I refuse to believe that God is a weak left-hander.

How can one avoid despondency if one thinks of the anomalous Zeeman effect?

It is always the older that emanates the new one.

Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. [A big drawing of a rectangle] Only technical details are missing.