Niels Bohr Quotes

Contraria Sunt Complementa

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.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions. (1927)

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.]

عكس مقولة صحيحة هو مقولة خاطئة ، ولكن عكس حقيقة مثبتة يمكن ان يكون حقيقة مؤكدة

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

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.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think

Two sorts of truth: profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.

كف عن إخبار الرب عما يجب عليه ان يفعله

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

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.

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.