Niels Bohr Quotes

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.

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

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.

The enrichment which art can give us originates in its power to remind us of harmonies beyond the grasp of systematic analysis. Literary, pictorial and musical art may be said to form a renunciation of definition, characteristic of scientific communication, leaves fantasy a freer display. In particular, in poetry this purpose is achieved by the juxtaposition of words relating to shifting observational situation, thereby emotionally uniting manifold aspects of human knowledge.

I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But 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.

If a scientist does not understand a problem, he writes down many formulae, but as soon as he has understood it, there remain at most two.

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

[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.]

Just as the freedom of the will is an experiential category of our psychic life, causality may be considered as a mode of perception by which we reduce our sense impressions to order.

We are suspended in language.

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

Contraria Sunt Complementa

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

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.

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

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think