Niels Bohr

When we speak of the electron, we are not speaking of something that really exists, but of something that we have imagined.

The very act of observing disturbs the system.

Truth and clarity are complementary.

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, but to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena.

The meaning of our words is always context-dependent.

It is not possible to describe the world without describing ourselves.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

The problem is not to make things simple, but to make them understandable.

I often say that 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.

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

When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

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

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

We are suspended in language.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

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.

The opposite of a shallow truth is a falsehood. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

The great lesson of quantum theory is that there is no deep reality.

We are all agreed that the only way to escape from the paradoxes of quantum theory is to give up the idea of a 'classical' description of reality.