The Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli Quotations
When the twenty-year-old Pauli delivered a five pound manuscript, Max Born (1921) wrote to Albert Einstein, full of praise: “This little chap is not only clever but industrious as well.” ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 2
Whoever studies this mature and grandly composed work would not believe that the author is a man of twenty-one. One does not know what to admire most: the psychological understanding of the evolution of ideas, the accuracy of mathematical deduction, the deep physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the knowledge of literature, the factual completeness, or the infallibility of criticism. ~Albert Einstein, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 2
In spite of later deep philosophical disagreement, Einstein always held Pauli in high esteem, and in an address in 1946 on occasion of Pauli’s Nobel prize the old Einstein called Pauli his spiritual son. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 2
Though I have sometimes regarded something right as wrong, I have never regarded something wrong as right. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 2
I don’t mind your thinking slowly, but I mind your publishing faster than you think. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 2
Following the advice of his father, he asked the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung for help. After an interview, Jung recognized the outstanding scientific training and intellectual capability of Pauli. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 3
Pauli finished his analysis in 1934, and married again in the same year. Nevertheless, Jung found his dreams so important that he asked Pauli to continue recording and interpreting his dreams and to stay in contact with him. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 3
Late in 1958 Pauli fell seriously ill, and on December 14 of that year he died of cancer in room number 137 at the Rotkreuzspital, Zurich. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 4
Pauli took Jung’s ideas seriously. He did not share the prevalent cheap attitude, “this is all nonsense,” but tried hard to understand. In spite of his critical stance, he was certainly not one of these “petty reasoning minds which cannot endure any paradoxes” denounced by Jung ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 4
Pauli was a compulsive writer, seemingly unable to think without a pen in his hand. He never published his ideas as quickly as possible but preferred to communicate his thoughts in long letters to his friends and colleagues, trying out new ideas. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 4
His father [Jung] complained: “The boy is interested in everything imaginable, but he does not know what he wants.” ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 5
For Pauli, the importance of Jung’s depth psychology was not only in therapy and analysis but predominantly in its potential to conceive our scientific approach to nature via primordial ideas. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 6
As physics strives after completeness, your analytical psychology longs for a home. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 7
More and more I see the key to the whole spiritual situation of our time in the psycho-physical problem. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 7
He [Kepler] has hold of the tail, I grasp the head.” Kepler responded: “I hold the tail but I hold it in my hand. You [Fludd] may grasp the head mentally, though only, I fear, in your dreams. ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 9
Pauli pointed out “that the alchemistic attempt to establish a psycho-physical universal language failed because it referred to a visible concrete reality,” and that such an effort seems to be much more promising if it “would refer to a deeper invisible reality.” ~Harald Atmanspacher, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 14
I have here reached the limits of what might be knowable in the framework of contemporary knowledge, and I have even approached the realm of “magic” … I am very well aware that this amounts to the threatening danger of a regression into most primitive superstition, that this would be much worse than Einstein’s regressive obligation to classical field physics, and that everything depends on retaining the positive results and values of rationality. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 5
The ordering factors must be considered beyond the distinction of “physical” and “‘psychic” – as Plato’s “ideas” share the character of a notion with that of a “natural force”. I am very much in favor of calling these ordering factors “archetypes”, but then it would be inadmissible to define them as contents of the psyche. Instead, the inner images are psychic manifestations of the archetypes, which, however, also would have to create, produce, cause everything in the material world that happens according to the laws of nature. The laws of the material world would thus refer to the physical manifestations of the archetypes … Each natural law should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even if this is not always immediately visible today. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli, Page 13
