"When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been made public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place. The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them. She had become an indissoluble part of their whole scheme of things, and that they were about to lose her appeared a scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinking—to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history—passing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories—to the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield—to Lord Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face under the green lamp, and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees, and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old King's turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold's soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother's feathers sweeping down towards her, and a great old repeater-watch of her father's in its tortoiseshell case, and a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at Kensington."

"Noch ist Raum/ für ein Gedicht// Noch ist das Gedicht/ ein Raum// wo man atmen kann"

"Mach wieder/ Wasser aus mir// Strömen will ich/ im Strom// ins Meer münden."

"Zur See sollten weder Furchtsame noch Tollkühne gehen."

"Wissenschaft wird von Menschen gemacht"

"Was wir mathematisch festlegen, ist nur zum kleinen Teil ein objektives Faktum, zum größeren Teil eine Übersicht über Möglichkeiten."

"Je mehr ich über den physikalischen Teil der Schrödingerschen Theorie nachdenke, desto abscheulicher finde ich ihn. [..] Was Schrödinger über die Anschaulichkeit seiner Theorie schreibt „dürfte wohl kaum eine sinngemäße...“ in a. W. ich finde es Mist. Die große Leistung der Schrödingerschen Theorie ist die Berechnung der Matritzenlemente [..]."

"Die Energie ist tatsächlich der Stoff, aus dem alle Elementarteilchen, alle Atome und daher überhaupt alle Dinge gemacht sind, und gleichzeitig ist die Energie auch das Bewegende."

"Die Wirklichkeit, von der wir sprechen können, ist nie die Wirklichkeit an sich, sondern […] eine von uns gestaltete Wirklichkeit."

"Bildung ist das, was übrig bleibt, wenn man alles vergessen hat, was man gelernt hat."