"I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
"Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them."
"Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they β¦"
"Two sorts of truth: profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast toβ¦"
"It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness."
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chaβ¦"
"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methβ¦"
"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
"Truth and clarity are complementary."