Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things.”

— Richard P. Feynman

202. “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

203. “In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be “known” with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.”

— Richard P. Feynman

204. “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

205. “It is probably better to realize that the probability concept is in a sense subjective, that it is always based on uncertain knowledge, and that its quantitative evaluation is subject to change as we obtain more information.”

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

207. “One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.”

— Richard P. Feynman

208. “Science is of value because it can produce something.”

— Richard P. Feynman

209. “This is not very important what I’m doing. I’m just proving something.”

— Richard P. Feynman

210. “I have a limited intelligence and I’ve used it in a particular direction.”

— Richard P. Feynman

211. “An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”

— Richard P. Feynman

212. “The exception proves that the rule is wrong.” That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

213. “This is not yet a scientific age.”

— Richard P. Feynman

214. “I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”

— Richard P. Feynman

215. “Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.”

— Richard P. Feynman

216. “Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald’s. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, “Because I am Feynman!” The young man went, “Ahhhhh!””

— Richard P. Feynman

217. “There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.”

— Richard P. Feynman

218. “As usual, nature’s imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.”

— Richard P. Feynman

219. “I’m not responsible for what other people think I am able to do; I don’t have to be good because they think I’m going to be good.”

— Richard P. Feynman

220. “Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

221. “We are never right, we can only be sure we are wrong.”

— Richard P. Feynman

222. “So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton’s equations, are reversible.”

— Richard P. Feynman

223. “You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.”

— Richard P. Feynman

224. “Maybe that is why young people make success. They don’t know enough.”

— Richard P. Feynman

225. “A great deal more is known than has been proved.”

— Richard P. Feynman

226. “The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.”

— Richard P. Feynman

227. “I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.”

— Richard P. Feynman

228. “When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you’ve told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.”

— Richard P. Feynman

229. “The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter – but it’s a damn good book anyway.”

— Richard P. Feynman

230. “It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand.”

— Richard P. Feynman

231. “To guess what to keep and what to throw away takes considerable skill. Actually it is probably merely a matter of luck, but it looks as if it takes considerable skill.”

— Richard P. Feynman

232. “Trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the Sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.”

— Richard P. Feynman

233. “I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.”

— Richard P. Feynman

234. “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right – at least if you have any experience – because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.”

— Richard P. Feynman

235. “I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. I was interested in possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not.”

— Richard P. Feynman

236. “I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.”

— Richard P. Feynman

237. “You have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.”

— Richard P. Feynman

238. “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

239. “If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.”

— Richard P. Feynman

240. “All we know so far is what doesn’t work.”

— Richard P. Feynman

241. “Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a man said, “I am going to tell you something that you will never forget.” And then he said, “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.”

— Richard P. Feynman

242. “Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure – the adventure into the unknown, an unknown that must be recognized as unknown in order to be explored, the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered, the attitude that all is uncertain. To summarize it: humility of the intellect.”

— Richard P. Feynman

243. “Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspiration to the arts and to many other activities of human beings.”

— Richard P. Feynman

244. “The things that mattered were honesty, independence, willingness to admit ignorance.”

— Richard P. Feynman

245. “It’s all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.”

— Richard P. Feynman

246. “I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these “dumb” questions:.”

— Richard P. Feynman

247. “Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.”

— Richard P. Feynman

248. “If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.”

— Richard P. Feynman

249. “Philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science.”

— Richard P. Feynman

250. “I’ve found out since that such people don’t know what they’re doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism.”

— Richard P. Feynman