Niels Bohr Quotes about Science

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

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

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

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

When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, '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.'

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

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

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

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

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

The present state of atomic theory is characterized by the fact that we not only believe the existence of atoms to be proved beyond a doubt, but also we even believe that we have an intimate knowledge of the constituents of the individual atoms.

In physics we deal with states of affairs much simpler than those of psychology and yet we again and again learn that our task is not to investigate the essence of things-we do not at all know what this would mean&mash;but to develop those concepts that allow us to speak with each other about the events of nature in a fruitful manner.

If you aren't confused by quantum mechanics, you haven't really understood it.

One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly.

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

A person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said.

Prediction is difficult, especially the future.