"It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness."

Niels Bohr Philosophy See all quotes by Niels Bohr →

React to this quote

More by Niels Bohr

“Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.”

“I am absolutely prepared to talk about the spiritual life of an electronic computer: to state that it is reflecting or is in a bad mood... The question whether the machine really feels or ponders, or whether it merely looks as though it did, is of course absolutely meaningingless.”

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.”

“Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

“It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I am persuaded there is no triumph equal to one achieved on the stage—it comes so immediate and so home : you have before you the mass of human beings whose sympathies are at your will; you witness th…"

— Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Literature1802–1838

#life

"Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain…"

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy1844–1900

#suffering

"Who do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten…"

— John le Carré

Literature1931–2020

#justice

"Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using …"

— Bertrand Russell

Philosophy1872–1970

#philosophy