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

The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.

If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That’s the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don’t enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it.

If we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?

If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data.

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.

In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort.

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

I think that if a United States of Europe were to be formed, it would be in our interests to fight for it, as all our old traditions would remain in such a united Europe, whereas if we were to start now as part of the Russian Empire, everything that had ever been in Germany would disappear.

Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

The single life is bearable to me only through my work in science, but for the long term, it would be very bad if I had to make do without a very young person next to me.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

In 1924, I became a Dozent in Gottingen and worked out the quantum mechanics during a holiday stay on Heligoland.

The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated.

Glory crowns the deeds of those who expose themselves to toils and dangers.

In public affairs men are often better pleased that the truth, though known to everybody, should be wrapped up under a decent cover than if it were exposed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world.

You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.

We’re living in a very tricky world, and unless we become analytical and expose the tricknology, people will become sucked into that. It is very easy, it is very, very easy.

Free speech gives us the ability to react vigorously with effective arguments and expose the weakness and misdirection of the other side’s claims.

I feel good to know that they recognize the potential of reggae music. And they are exposing it to the world, letting the world hear how beautiful reggae music can be.

I’m reading so much and exposing myself to so many new ideas. It almost feels like the chemistry and the structure of my brain is changing so rapidly sometimes.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.