Bohr, Niels

"The universe does not require our permission to exist."

"In each moment lies the possibility of transformation."

"The bonds we forge with ideas are as real as any physical connection."

"Nothing is ever truly lost; it is only transformed."

"The pursuit of understanding is itself the greatest reward."

"All phenomena are interconnected in ways we are only beginning to understand."

"The heart of science is wonder; the mind of science is reason."

"To live fully is to constantly question and grow."

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

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

"The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees."

"Truth and clarity are complementary."

"I go along with the flowing stream of life and accept the unfolding of events."

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

"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry."

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

"The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple concepts."

"Abandon the hope that science will ever be able to draw nearer to truth."

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool."

"No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered phenomenon."

"Anybody who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of nature as the study of methods of inquiry into nature."

"The growth of science is the discovery of a growing identity of character between the laws of nature on different scales of magnitude."

"I would not call it the language of God, but rather the thoughts of the universe."

"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks."

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

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather an assessment that something else is more important than fear."

"What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science."

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