Niels Bohr Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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
Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

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

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

Niels Bohr
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

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
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
It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

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
Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

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

Niels Bohr
Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

Niels Bohr
It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

Niels Bohr
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

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
Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it.
Of quantum mechanics

Niels Bohr
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Niels Bohr
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

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
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

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