Niels Bohr

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

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

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

"I go around as a ghost, and no one sees me."

"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."

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth."

"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, as the study of how we ask questions about nature."

"Niels is always optimistic."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to prevent one's work from being suppressed, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

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

"There are some things so serious that you can only joke about them."

"Loving is the only way to expect a return of love."

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself."

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

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

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

"Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

"I read in the newspaper that Einstein has declared himself an atheist. This does not bother me, for God does not care."

"Better an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question."

"The basis of the faith of all workers in science is the faith in the universality and rationality of nature."

"Since the rise of quantum mechanics, physics has lost all connection with reality."

"We must turn to nature itself, that source of all true knowledge."

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

"Any great work of art revels in and reveals to us the details of human feeling."

"No description of the facts can ever be complete."

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

"The problems of the future can only be solved if we understand what went wrong in the past."

"Real generalizations are not produced by thought, but by the discovery of new facts."

"Writing the name of a thing is like a murder—a sacrilege."

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."