Niels Bohr Quotes

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.]

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:]

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

The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.

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

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

We are suspended in language.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.