Niels Bohr Quotes

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

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.

It is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obsesses the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into innumerable and inane controversies and fancies.

Conduct is more convincing than language.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence - and even start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

... nothing is more human than substituting the quantity of words and actions for their character. But using imprecise words is very similar to using lots of words, for the more imprecise a word is, the greater the area it covers.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

I think that the development of any culture has something to do with the way people deal with the concept of illusion. The fact that the sound of my voice and the way I modulate it creates pictures in your head... in order for us to accumulate knowledge, we have to create symbolic exchanges that let ourselves be fooled temporarily by something that's not there - by a substitute for reality. When you talk about representation, you're talking about language.

People just project their idea of my character on to me and they just seem to assume that I'm the same, when in reality I'm not.

Lets take the best of our ideas from Global Drucker Forum, and the best of our language, and then focus and clarify.

Being that can be understood is language.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

The communication of ideas requires a similitude of thought and language . . .

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical.

The description is not the described.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.