Niels Bohr Quotes

Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

To do the impossible, you need to ignore the popular.

I've seen the truth, and it makes no sense.

You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.

Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there.

We need a science to save us from science.

Originality is the only thing that counts. But the originator uses material and ideas that occur round him and pass through him. And out of his experience comes the original creation.

To do something innovative means that you reject reason.

Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.

I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens.

I'm always trying to do things that no one has ever seen before.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.

Creativity doesn't follow titles. It just comes from where it comes from.

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.

Originality implies a return to the origins, original is returning to the simplicity of the first solutions.

All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules; otherwise we would never have anything new.

You mustn't expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn't interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.