Max Born Quotes

Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle.

It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher.

There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science.

I love science and that time in history when science and the humanities were the same thing.

I was a terrible science student, so I could never be a scientist; my mind doesn't work that way. But I've learned to love the stories around science, and I have so much respect and fascination for the people who can make discoveries and find applications. There's a lot of drama there.

Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.

Science is constantly proved all the time. If we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and destroyed it, in a thousand years' time, that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back because all the same tests would be the same result.

The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.

This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

It is clear that while science provides insights into the complexity of the world around us, those insights...present a fractured mosaic rather than a seamless whole. There are profound limits to science that must be recognized if we are to minimize the destructive consequences of using the powers provided by scientific discovery.

Over and over, expanding scientific knowledge has shown religious claims to be false.

I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.

Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

There are only two things one has to bear in mind. One has to be credulous - able to believe - and skeptical - able to not believe, because if you are not skeptical, you will believe rubbish. If you are not credulous you will learn nothing and the only way to balance those two is to recognize the mystery of things.

On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.