Niels Bohr Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niels Bohr
Predictions can be very difficult—especially about the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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