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| King Gustaf VI Adolf at the inauguration of the Department of Physics in 1951 and Niels Bohr |
On Understanding Quantum Mechanics: "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
On Complementarity: "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
On Knowledge and Expertise: "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
On Prediction: "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
On the Nature of Science: "There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them."
On Communication: "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
On Scientific Progress: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."
On Clarity: "Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
On Education: "An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them."
On Atomic Theory: "A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
On Reality: "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
On Complementarity (Extended): "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
On Open-mindedness: "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."
On Learning: "The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
On Scientific Inquiry: "No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical."
On Models and Reality: "The very nature of the quantum theory forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description."
On Discovery: "No paradox, no progress."
On Certainty: "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."
On The Nature of Questions: "The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning."
On Challenges: "Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it."
On Complexity: "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
On Quantum Mechanics: "If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them."
On Scientific Method: "In our description of nature, the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience."
On The Limits of Language: "It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth."
On Human Understanding: "Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world."
On Innovation: "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."
On Dialogue: "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
On Science and Philosophy: "There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them."
On Limits of Knowledge: "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry."
On Relativity of Truth: "No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical."