When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.
Interpretation
Life is a complex interplay where we are both participants and observers in our experiences.
This quote by Niels Bohr emphasizes the dual roles we play in life as both active participants (actors) and passive observers (spectators) of our own existence. It suggests that to find harmony in life, one must recognize the balance of engaging deeply with our experiences while also maintaining a level of detachment to understand the broader narrative of existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about finding balance in life.
When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.'
An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
People, human beings with all their creative diversity, are the makers of history.
I have been accused of having believed when I wrote Sex and Temperament that there are no sex differences... This, many readers felt, was too much. It was too pretty. I must have found what I was looking for. But this misconception comes from a lack of understanding of what anthropology means, of the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder, that which one would not have been able to guess.
Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinetisimal change ripples outward —ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter —maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.
Superstition is an enemy to civil liberty.
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs
When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously, even if it's just gratitude for breathing, gratitude for the aliveness that you feel in your body. Gratitude is there when you acknowledge the aliveness of the present moment.
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