Wolfgang Pauli Quotes

Quotes by and about Wolfgang Pauli

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

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

[When asked to give his opinion of a book he didn't like:]
Pauli: "The setup of the book as far as printing and paper are concerned is splendid."

[When asked to give his opinion of a science paper he didn't like:]
Pauli: "It's so bad it's not even wrong."

Pauli: "A truly major discovery, such as the theory of relativity, may later result in a fixation on the past. A similar thing seems to have been the case with Freud."

Pauli: "[After the discovery of quantum physics it is now] really paradoxical that physicists are now obliged to tell psychologists that they must not eliminate the unconscious in their statistical investigations."

Pauli: "[There is a] pathological exaggeration of the thinking function in Hegel."

Victor Weisskopf: "It was absolutely marvelous working for Wolfgang Pauli. You could ask him anything. There was no worry that he would think a particular question was stupid, since he thought all questions were stupid."

[Albert Einstein: "Physics is the description of reality."]
Pauli: "Physics is the description of what one simply imagines."

Albert Einstein: "[I admire] his psychological understanding for the development of ideas."

David P. Lindorff: "[Pauli considered Marie-Louise von Franz] the first woman he had met who was the same psychological type as himself."