Max Planck Quotes

There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) the world as a unity dependent on humanity; (2) the world as a reality independent of the human factor.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

I do not mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, but I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us, and which is incomplete and limited. Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely coincidence that we can see stars with them, as well.

The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe-that the world is a cosmos and a chaos.

If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.

It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream.

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.

How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.

With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.

History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.

To see things as they really were--what an empoverishment!

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

The force fields of nature are force fields of consciousness. They are force fields of knowledge.

We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world!

If you're going into stand-up, you're hyper-analyzing the world and asking as many questions about a thing as you possibly can so you can figure out the ultimate nature of that thing.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

The only thing we have to give to the world is our own grasp on it.