Niels Bohr Quotes

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

Prediction is difficult, especially the future.

A person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said.

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. 'Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?' he asks. 'No,' replies the colleague, 'but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it.'

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

You are not thinking, you are just being logical.

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

Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.

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

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

In quantum mechanics...an observation here and now changes in general the 'state' of the observed system....I consider the unpredictable change of the state by a single observation...to be an abandonment of the idea of the isolation of the observer from the course of physical events outside himself.

Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be

Of course I don't believe in it [pointing to horseshoe on his office wall]. But I understand that it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.

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

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.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

It is difficult to predict, especially the future.

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far.

It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.

Predition is risky, especially of the future.

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

In physics we deal with states of affairs much simpler than those of psychology and yet we again and again learn that our task is not to investigate the essence of things-we do not at all know what this would mean&mash;but to develop those concepts that allow us to speak with each other about the events of nature in a fruitful manner.

We all know your idea is crazy. The question is whether it is crazy enough.

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

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature

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.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

Perhaps I have found out a little about the structure of atoms.

There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

One must always do what one really cannot.

Predictions are hard, especially abot the future.

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

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.

The Stone Age didn't end because the World ran out of stones

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.

Truth and clarity are complementary

Using the word much as it is used in atomic physics to characterize the relationship between experience obtained by different experimental arrangements and visualized only by mutually exclusive ideas, we may truly say that different human cultures are complimentary to each other ... each such culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent potentialities of human life unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety.

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

Some things are so serious, they can only be joked about.

If you think you understand it, that only shows that you don't know the first thing about it.

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

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

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

A deep truth is a truth so deep that not only is it true but it's exact opposite is also true.

Nothing exists until it is measured.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

The opposite of every great idea is another great idea.

When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

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

Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world

One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly.

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

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

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

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

Physics is the belief that a simple and consistent description of nature is possible.

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

All rising curves that show unwelcome trends in human affairs will approach infinity if extended far enough, but it is we who dictate the curve and not vice versa.

Rutherford is a man you can rely on; he comes regularly and enquires how things are going and talks about the smallest details - Rutherford is such an outstanding man and really interested in the work of all the people around him.