Niels Bohr Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Niels Bohr
The old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belongs statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called 'deep truths', are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.

Niels Bohr
The present state of atomic theory is characterized by the fact that we not only believe the existence of atoms to be proved beyond a doubt, but also we even believe that we have an intimate knowledge of the constituents of the individual atoms.

Niels Bohr
In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

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
Predictions can be very difficult—especially about the future.

Niels Bohr