"He was very easily hurt and therefore would let down a curtain. He tried to live without admitting reality. And his unworldliness stemmed precisely his belief that that was possible."

"I related to Feynman other anecdotes about physicists. Some of these were Pauli stories. I told him what I had learned from Pauli when I asked him about his opinion of various physicists. Feynman especially enjoyed the following remarks of Pauli. About Oppenheimer, Pauli had said: 'He always acts like the caricature of God in action!' About Hermann Weyl: 'One must first penetrate his façade [literally 'makeup', Schminke in German] in order to understand his thoughts.' About Leon Rosenfeld: 'He is the choirboy of the Pope [Niels Bohr]!' About Freeman Dyson, which I had heard from Telegdi: 'Everyone wants to learn something from me; no one wants to teach me anything. I had hoped Dyson would do it, but he's only a mathematician!' By now, Feynman was becoming quite eager: 'Did you ask Pauli about me?' I said, 'Yes.' 'Well, what did he say?' I replied, 'When I asked Pauli what he thought of you, he was amused, and replied, "Oh, Feynman, that Feynman, he talks like a gangster!"' This story made Feynman's day; nothing could have pleased him more."

"The famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have remarked that the deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image."

"It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!"

"What distinguished him mostly was his sharp tongue. Everybody was scared of him. He had nasty things to say about almost everybody. I remember the very first time I met him at a conference in Zurich. He was talking with a whole group of people about Julian Schwinger, who had just come to Switzerland. Schwinger was a brilliant young American who had done some very fine work. He was a rival of Feynman; they were the two geniuses then. Pauli was saying that Schwinger told us all this stuff that actually made sense, not like that nonsense Dyson has been writing. At that point I came walking up with a friend of mine, Markus Fierz, who was also a Swiss scientist. With a twinkle in his eye, Fierz came up to Pauli and said, “Please allow me to introduce you to my friend, Freeman Dyson.” Pauli said, “Oh that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t understand German.” Which of course I did. That was a good beginning and we were friends right from the very first day."

"Although Heisenberg and Dirac may have been even more creative than Pauli, no physicist alive was more clever."

"I think you and Uhlenbeck have been very lucky to get your spinning electron published and talked about before Pauli heard of it. It appears that more than a year ago Kronig believed in the spinning electron and worked out something; the first person he showed it to was Pauli. Pauli ridiculed the whole thing so much that the first person became also the last and no one else heard anything of it. Which all goes to show that the infallibility of the Deity does not extend to his self-styled vicar on earth."

"What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature — outside of our arbitrariness— to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images... The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical... I am all for it to call this "organizing and regulating" "archetypes." It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes."

"It seems significant that according to quantum physics the indestructibility of energy on one hand — which expresses its timeless existence — and the appearance of energy in space and time on the other hand correspond to two contradictory (complementary) aspects of reality. In fact, both are always present, but in individual cases the one or the other may be more pronounced."

"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."

"Both of us [seem] to agree that the future of Jung's ideas is not with [psycho-] therapy... but with a unitarian, holistic concept of nature and the position of man in it."

""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."

"It is always the older that emanates the new one."

"In the new pattern of thought we do not assume any longer the detached observer, occurring in the idealizations of this classical type of theory, but an observer who by his indeterminable effects creates a new situation, theoretically described as a new state of the observed system. In this way every observation is a singling out of a particular factual result, here and now, from the theoretical possibilities, therefore making obvious the discontinuous aspect of physical phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains still in the new kind of theory an objective reality, inasmuch as these theories deny any possibility for the observer to influence the result of a measurement, once the experimental arrangement is chosen. Therefore particular qualities of an individual observer do not enter into the conceptual framework of the theory."

"The designation "Jungian Psychology" is actually already unscientific sectarianism. I only acknowledge C. G. Jung's contribution to the general psychology of the unconscious."

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

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

"The failure of the many attempts to measure terrestrially any effects of the earth’s motion..."

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

"In later years, Pauli seems to have decided that Bohr himself was not a complete supporter of the Copenhagen interpretation. [...] He felt that the real Copenhagen interpretation did insist that the mind was something that you could not avoid referring to in formulating quantum mechanics. Pauli thought, as far as I can judge, that the division between system and apparatus was ultimately between mind and matter."

"I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think."

"When I was young, I thought I was the best formalist of my time. I thought I was a revolutionary. When the big problems would come, I would solve them and write about them. The big problems came and passed by, others solved them and wrote about them. I was a classicist and not a revolutionary."

"God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil."

"The setup of the book as far as printing and paper are concerned is splendid."

"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?”."

"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."