Niels Bohr Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Niels Bohr
In our time, when increasing knowledge and ability more than ever link the fate of all peoples, international collaboration in science has far-reaching tasks which may be furthered not least by an awareness of the general conditions for human knowledge.

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 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
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
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
In physics... our problem consists in the co-ordination of our experience of the external world.

Niels Bohr
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

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

Niels Bohr
It is important to realize that science, which knows no national boundaries and whose achievements are the common possession of mankind, has through the ages united men in their efforts to elucidate the foundations of our knowledge.

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
We must, therefore, be prepared to find that further advance into this region will require a still more extensive renunciation of features which we are accustomed to demand of the space time mode of description.

Niels Bohr
Anyone who is not shocked by the quantum theory has not understood it.

Niels Bohr
To aim at such a distant object and hit it is of course impossible. But if one has the impudence to throw in that direction without aiming, and in addition to imagine something so absurd as that one might hit it, yes, then perhaps it can happen. The idea that something perhaps could happen can be stronger than practice and will.

Niels Bohr
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

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

Niels Bohr
[Quantum mechanics requires] a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical reality.

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
Your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Niels Bohr
My starting point was rather the stability of matter, a pure miracle when considered from the standpoint of classical physics. By "stability" I mean that the same substances always have the same properties.

Niels Bohr
The importance of physical science for the development of general philosophical thinking rests not only on its contributions to our steadily increasing knowledge of that nature of which we ourselves are part, but also on the opportunities which time and again it has offered for examination and refinement of our conceptual tools.

Niels Bohr
All knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework adapted to account for previous experience and that any such frame may prove too narrow to comprehend new experiences.

Niels Bohr
In every experiment on living organisms, there must remain an uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism in this respect is just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us.

Niels Bohr
Our only way of avoiding the extremes of materialism and mysticism is the never ending endeavor to balance analysis and synthesis.

Niels Bohr
In quantum mechanics, we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded.

Niels Bohr