“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Interview in 'The Observer' (25 January 1931), p.17, column 3
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Max Planck 30
German theoretical physicist 1858–1947Related quotes

“Consciousness IS everything, is WITH everything and is BETWEEN everything.”

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

Lectures XVI and XVII, "Mysticism"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point
Context: The truth is sum, ergo cogito — I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without feeling, without that species of materiality which feelings lends to it? Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove [Descartes] have said: "I feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable?

Fourth Lecture, p. 74.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)

Source: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914), p. 106