“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
— Richard P. Feynman
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
“I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
“Teach principles not formulas.”
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”
“Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.”
“To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.”
“The only way to deep happiness is to do something you love to the best of your ability.”
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
“Physics isn’t the most important thing. Love is.”
“If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.”
“I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
“I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.”
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter.”
“I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”
“I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”
“If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week.”
“There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.”
“We need to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed. It’s OK to say, “I don’t know.””
“Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.”
“Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty.”
“Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
“People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.”
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.”
“The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things.”
“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”
“Some people say, “How can you live without knowing?” I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.”
“Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.”
“Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science – for to fill your heart with love is enough.”
“Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there.”
“Experiment is the sole judge of the validity of any idea.”
“Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.”
“Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!”
“The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.”
“Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person.”
“You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying “one, two, three, four, five protons”, they say, “hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron.””
“The exception tests the rule.”
“My rule is, when you are unhappy, think about it. But when you’re happy, don’t. Why spoil it? You’re probably happy for some ridiculous reason and you’d just spoil it to know it.”
“It’s amazing how many people even today use a computer to do something you can do with a pencil and paper in less time.”
“There is enough energy in a single cubic meter of space to boil all the oceans in the world.”
“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell. And so it is with science.”
“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”
“Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist’s plate than on the physicist’s: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!”
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
“But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
“All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.”
“Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.”
“Thank you very Much, I enjoyed myself.”
“Precise language is not the problem. Clear language is the problem.”
“Turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics.”
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
“The easiest person to fool is yourself.”
“You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.”
“Since then I never pay attention to anything by “experts”. I calculate everything myself.”
“Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naive ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.”
“We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.”
“I think nature’s imagination Is so much greater than man’s, she’s never going to let us relax.”
“All mass is interaction.”
“For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
“That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.”
“But logic is not all, one needs one’s heart to follow an idea.”
“There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.”
“I love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn’t want to chance ruining the machine.”
“It turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.”
“There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.”
“Today’s brains are yesterday’s mashed potatoes.”
“Victory usually goes to those green enough to underestimate the monumental hurdles they are facing.”
“No man is rich who is unsatisfied, but who wants nothing possess his heart’s desire.”
“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.”
“I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.”
“For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.”
“Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.”
“Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.”
“We scientists are clever – too clever – are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!”
“You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.”
“The electron is a theory. But the theory is so good we can almost consider them real.”
“A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it’s considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.”
“It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.”
“By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.”
“But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.”
“It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.”
“A philosopher once said, ‘It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.’ Well, they don’t!”
“Light is something like raindrops each little lump of light is called a photon and if the light is all one color, all the “raindrops” are the same.”
“What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?”
“This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”
“I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys – but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!”
“There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers.”
“The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!”
“As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.”
“There’s plenty of room at the bottom.”
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