Niels Bohr Quotes

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

كف عن إخبار الرب عما يجب عليه ان يفعله

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

What is it that we humans depend on? 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.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. 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.

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.

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

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 very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.

Un experto es una persona que ha cometido todos los errores que se pueden cometer en un determinado campo.

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

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

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.

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

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.]