Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.”

— Richard P. Feynman

102. “The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!”

— Richard P. Feynman

103. “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.”

— Richard P. Feynman

104. “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!”

— Richard P. Feynman

105. “But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.”

— Richard P. Feynman

106. “Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, “Is it reasonable?””

— Richard P. Feynman

107. “Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.”

— Richard P. Feynman

108. “To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.”

— Richard P. Feynman

109. “As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.”

— Richard P. Feynman

110. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

— Richard P. Feynman

111. “Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.”

— Richard P. Feynman

112. “People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.”

— Richard P. Feynman

113. “The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.”

— Richard P. Feynman

114. “Everything is made of atoms.”

— Richard P. Feynman

115. “Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

— Richard P. Feynman

116. “The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ’ought to be.”

— Richard P. Feynman

117. “It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.”

— Richard P. Feynman

118. “Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.”

— Richard P. Feynman

119. “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

— Richard P. Feynman

120. “If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that’s the way to become a computer scientist.”

— Richard P. Feynman

121. “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”

— Richard P. Feynman

122. “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

123. “Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.”

— Richard P. Feynman

124. “If you have any talent, or any occupation that delights you, do it, and do it to the hilt. Don’t ask why, or what difficulties you may get into.”

— Richard P. Feynman

125. “The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting.”

— Richard P. Feynman

126. “Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.”

— Richard P. Feynman

127. “Don’t pay attention to “authorities,” think for yourself.”

— Richard P. Feynman

128. “Science is uncertain.”

— Richard P. Feynman

129. “What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”

— Richard P. Feynman

130. “Doubt is clearly a value in science. It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value.”

— Richard P. Feynman

131. “I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

— Richard P. Feynman

132. “Work hard to find something that fascinates you.”

— Richard P. Feynman

133. “Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

— Richard P. Feynman

134. “The same equations have the same solutions.”

— Richard P. Feynman

135. “Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.”

— Richard P. Feynman

136. “If an apple was magnified to the size of the Earth, then the atoms in the apple would be approximately the size of the original apple.”

— Richard P. Feynman

137. “Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.”

— Richard P. Feynman

138. “What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.”

— Richard P. Feynman

139. “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?”

— Richard P. Feynman

140. “It is simple, therefore it is beautiful.”

— Richard P. Feynman

141. “What did you ASK at school today?”

— Richard P. Feynman

142. “Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.”

— Richard P. Feynman

143. “People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!”

— Richard P. Feynman

144. “It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”

— Richard P. Feynman

145. “Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.”

— Richard P. Feynman

146. “A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.”

— Richard P. Feynman

147. “Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.”

— Richard P. Feynman

148. “The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.”

— Richard P. Feynman

149. “If you don’t like it, go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler.”

— Richard P. Feynman

150. “I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.”

— Richard P. Feynman