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.

— Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr Quotes

Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be.

— Niels Bohr

We all know your idea is crazy. The question is whether it is crazy enough.

— Niels Bohr

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.

— Niels Bohr

Truth and clarity are complementary.

— Niels Bohr

Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.

— Niels Bohr

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

— Niels Bohr

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

— Niels Bohr

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

— Niels Bohr

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.

— Niels Bohr

We are suspended in language.

— Niels Bohr

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.

— Niels Bohr

You are not thinking, you are just being logical.

— Niels Bohr

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

— Niels Bohr

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.

— Niels Bohr

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

— Niels Bohr

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

— Niels Bohr

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

— Niels Bohr

I feel personally responsible for the universe’s inevitable heat death.

— Niels Bohr

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.

— Niels Bohr

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

— Niels Bohr
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