Bohr, Niels

"The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities."

"The goal is not to understand nature in the way one understands a simple mechanical problem."

"In the atom, we are confronted with a reality which in many respects is completely different from anything in the world of our direct experience."

"Genius is someone who has two great ideas in a lifetime. You are lucky if you have even one."

"The language of nature is mathematics, but we must learn to read it in new ways."

"For beginners in physics, it is often good to recall that nature does not care whether you have the most modern theories or not."

"When dealing with atoms, we can never speak of the 'things themselves.'"

"The principle of correspondence ensures that all old ideas still apply in their proper domain."

"What is not possible in all respects is that one should be able to say something definite about both position and velocity at the same time."

"Youth is wasted on the young only if they do not use it to question everything."

"The Danish spirit of compromise and seeking consensus is the cornerstone of good society."

"Nature is bigger than we think it is, and we are never quite finished learning its lessons."

"If you can explain your theory to a farmer, it is probably not right."

"Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the world, but we need experience to interpret it."

"In physics, the beauty of a theory is often a good indication of its truth."

"We are all connected through the fabric of the atom."

"Every great truth begins as heresy and ends as dogma."

"The greatest gift we can give our students is not knowledge, but the joy of discovery."

"Behind every scientific formula is a story of human struggle and insight."

"Nature reveals her secrets not all at once, but gradually as we learn to ask better questions."

"The classical description of the world is an approximation; reality is fundamentally quantum."

"In science, as in life, context is everything."

"We are witnesses to the quantum world, not masters of it."

"The universe does not reveal its mysteries to those who demand certainty."

"A difficult time can be more readily endured if we can see it as an opportunity for growth."

"The act of observation changes the thing observed."

"Time is not something external; it is woven into the fabric of existence itself."

"The physicist must be prepared to find nature stranger than his most daring imagination."

"Beauty in physics comes from the unity of apparently disparate phenomena."

"We cannot separate the observer from the observed."