Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honesty in reporting results – the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been – and finally – an important thing – the intelligence to interpret the results.”

— Richard P. Feynman

152. “If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he’s full of crap.”

— Richard P. Feynman

153. “We find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty: “It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true”.”

— Richard P. Feynman

154. “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.”

— Richard P. Feynman

155. “No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”

— Richard P. Feynman

156. “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”

— Richard P. Feynman

157. “If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”

— Richard P. Feynman

158. “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”

— Richard P. Feynman

159. “We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out.”

— Richard P. Feynman

160. “Nature’s imagination far surpasses our own.”

— Richard P. Feynman

161. “I am not interested in what today’s mathematicians find interesting.”

— Richard P. Feynman

162. “Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad – but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.”

— Richard P. Feynman

163. “There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!”

— Richard P. Feynman

164. “The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don’t know one or two rules.”

— Richard P. Feynman

165. “I don’t believe I can really do without teaching.”

— Richard P. Feynman

166. “It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is.”

— Richard P. Feynman

167. “There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.”

— Richard P. Feynman

168. “To test whether you have learned an idea or a definition, rephrase what you just learned without using the new word.”

— Richard P. Feynman

169. “When I found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real, I wasn’t upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated – it was getting out of hand.”

— Richard P. Feynman

170. “While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won’t understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.”

— Richard P. Feynman

171. “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.”

— Richard P. Feynman

172. “Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.”

— Richard P. Feynman

173. “Few people realize the number of things that are possible.”

— Richard P. Feynman

174. “I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work.”

— Richard P. Feynman

175. “The other great heritage is Christian ethics – the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent.”

— Richard P. Feynman

176. “Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.”

— Richard P. Feynman

177. “We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be. She’s always got better imagination than we have.”

— Richard P. Feynman

178. “You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.”

— Richard P. Feynman

179. “As revealed by physics, the truth is so remarkable, so amazing!”

— Richard P. Feynman

180. “We are lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries.”

— Richard P. Feynman

181. “We have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know.”

— Richard P. Feynman

182. “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.”

— Richard P. Feynman

183. “You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

184. “Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

185. “If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.”

— Richard P. Feynman

186. “I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere, I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something. I’m making some contribution.” It’s just psychological.”

— Richard P. Feynman

187. “From a long view of the history of mankind the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

188. “There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.”

— Richard P. Feynman

189. “But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.”

— Richard P. Feynman

190. “The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.”

— Richard P. Feynman

191. “The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.”

— Richard P. Feynman

192. “Strange! I don’t understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.”

— Richard P. Feynman

193. “If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.”

— Richard P. Feynman

194. “I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things.”

— Richard P. Feynman

195. “I don’t have to be good because they think I’m going to be good.”

— Richard P. Feynman

196. “All the time you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could do that, but I won’t,’ – which is just another way of saying that you can’t.”

— Richard P. Feynman

197. “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

— Richard P. Feynman

198. “Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question – to doubt – to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.”

— Richard P. Feynman

199. “I’m trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS.”

— Richard P. Feynman

200. “To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.”

— Richard P. Feynman