Niels Bohr Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

  Niels Bohr

  Inspirational, Creating, Poetry

  Niels Bohr's response to questions on the nature of language during his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg (Summer 1920), as quoted in "Discussions about Language", 1933, in Robert J. Pranger "Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy" (p. 11), 1972, and in Steve Giles "Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory" (p. 28), 1993.

• When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

  Niels Bohr

  Science, Atoms, Language

  Niels Bohr's response to questions on the nature of language during his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg (Summer 1920), as quoted in "Discussions about Language", 1933, in Robert J. Pranger "Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy" (p. 11), 1972, and in Steve Giles "Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory" (p. 28), 1993.

• We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

  Niels Bohr

  Play, Degrees, Statistics

• What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

  Niels Bohr

  Science, Ideas, Tasks

• We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

  Niels Bohr

  Character, Reality, Ideas

  "Philosophy of Science", Volume 37 (p. 157), 1934; later quoted in Roger Gerhard Newton "The Truth of Science: Physical Theories and Reality" (p. 176), 1997.

• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

  Niels Bohr

  Independent, Judgement, Development

  Niels Bohr, Leon Rosenfeld (1999). “Collected works”

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