Niels Bohr Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Niels Bohr
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

Niels Bohr
No, no, you are not thinking, you are just being logical.

Niels Bohr
An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.

Niels Bohr
The study of atoms not only has deepened our insight into a new domain of experience, but has thrown new light on general problems of knowledge.

Niels Bohr
One of the favourite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.

Niels Bohr
The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.

Niels Bohr
For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

Niels Bohr
As the goal of science is to augment and order our experience, every analysis of the conditions of human knowledge must rest on considerations of the character and scope of our means of communication.

Niels Bohr
For objective description and harmonious comprehension it is necessary in almost every field of knowledge to pay attention to the circumstances under which evidence is obtained.

Niels Bohr
If we couldn't laugh at ourselves, that would be the end of everything.

Niels Bohr
The task of science is both to extend the range of our experience and reduce it to order.

Niels Bohr
What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

Niels Bohr
It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.

Niels Bohr
Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.

Niels Bohr
The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some new, obscure reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

Niels Bohr
What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

Niels Bohr
The very nature of the quantum theory... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.

Niels Bohr
It seems necessary to introduce in the laws in question a quantity foreign to classical electrodynamics, I.e., Planck's constant, or as it is often called, the elementary quantum of action.

Niels Bohr
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Niels Bohr
You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!

Niels Bohr
When asked if he, a brilliant scientist, really believed a horseshoe above his door would bring him luck:
Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.

Niels Bohr
The old thermodynamics is to statistical thermodynamics what classical mechanics is to quantum mechanics.

Niels Bohr
When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

Niels Bohr
But, but, but...if anybody says he can think about quantum theory without getting giddy it merely shows that he hasn't understood the first thing about it!

Niels Bohr