Niels Bohr

"Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised."

"Change is the law of life."

"Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyranny."

"Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting."

"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."

"The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."

"To be a leader, you must first be a follower."

"Money is not the root of all evil, ignorance is."

"Gratitude is the sign of noble souls."

"The beauty of a flower fades, but its memory remains forever."

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

"The task of science is both to understand the world and to improve it."

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

"I go as a tourist into the future."

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

"Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand."

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

"Life is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

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

"The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask."

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

"Don't say that man has discovered nuclear energy—say rather that man has discovered that which has always existed."

"The opposite of a true statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth."

"Light and darkness that succeed each other cannot exist without one another."

"The beauty of physical science lies in the depth and breadth of the connections it reveals."

"No description of reality can ever be complete or absolute."

"I read with great interest what you write, but I do not think I could better explain my views."

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself—nature does it for you."

"If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."

"The definition of truth is that it lasts, that it continues to work in new contexts."