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.]

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

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

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.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

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

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

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

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.

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

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

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

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

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

There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

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

[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.