Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “With quantum physics, who needs drugs?”

— Richard P. Feynman

252. “In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right...”

— Richard P. Feynman

253. “People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don’t give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don’t know.”

— Richard P. Feynman

254. “Every object is a mixture of lots of things, so we can deal with it only as a series of approximations and idealizations.”

— Richard P. Feynman

255. “I said, “There’s a long tradition behind life in India that comes from a religion and philosophy that is thousands of years old. And although these people are not in India, they still pass on those traditions about what’s important in life – trying to build for the future and supporting their children in the effort – which have come down to them for centuries.”

— Richard P. Feynman

256. “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.”

— Richard P. Feynman

257. “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

258. “If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell ‘friend,’ I say to them that something’s the matter with the way you spell friend.”

— Richard P. Feynman

259. “The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things...”

— Richard P. Feynman

260. “The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination, in a tight straightjacket.”

— Richard P. Feynman

261. “It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

262. “When a Caltech student asked the eminent cosmologist Michael Turner what his “bias” was in favoring one or another particle as a likely candidate to compromise dark matter in the universe, Feynmann snapped, “Why do you want to know his bias? Form your own bias!””

— Richard P. Feynman

263. “This attitude of mind – this attitude of uncertainty – is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.”

— Richard P. Feynman

264. “It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.”

— Richard P. Feynman

265. “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Upon identifying the reason for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and his demonstration using immersion in iced water to show that O-rings grow brittle when cold.”

— Richard P. Feynman

266. “Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?”

— Richard P. Feynman

267. “I don’t believe in honors, it bothers me, honors bother, honors is epaulettes, honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it, it hurts me.”

— Richard P. Feynman

268. “There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

269. “There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.”

— Richard P. Feynman

270. “When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface.”

— Richard P. Feynman

271. “It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.”

— Richard P. Feynman

272. “Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”

— Richard P. Feynman

273. “No one really understands quantum mechanics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

274. “Although it is uncertain, it is necessary to make science useful. Science is only useful if it tells you about some experiment that has not been done; it is not good if it only tells you what just went on.”

— Richard P. Feynman

275. “In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”

— Richard P. Feynman

276. “There’s so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it’s almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.”

— Richard P. Feynman

277. “We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”

— Richard P. Feynman

278. “Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don’t always represent a real situation.”

— Richard P. Feynman

279. “The scale of light can be described by numbers called the frequency and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can’t see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It’s still light only the number is different.”

— Richard P. Feynman

280. “Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for ‘physicists’ license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.”

— Richard P. Feynman

281. “We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.”

— Richard P. Feynman

282. “There was an interesting early relationship between physics and biology in which biology helped physics in the discovery of the conservation of energy, which was first demonstrated by Mayer in connection with the amount of heat taken in and given out by a living creature.”

— Richard P. Feynman

283. “Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

284. “Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully.”

— Richard P. Feynman

285. “No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”

— Richard P. Feynman

286. “Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative.”

— Richard P. Feynman

287. “Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment. We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science. So, if something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that it is not a science.”

— Richard P. Feynman

288. “If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?”

— Richard P. Feynman

289. “I USED to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere – usually in Las Vegas.”

— Richard P. Feynman

290. “It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.”

— Richard P. Feynman

291. “Being the word of God connects the ethical and metaphysical aspects of religion. And finally, that also inspires the inspiration, because if you are working for God and obeying God’s will, you are in some way connected to the universe, your actions have a meaning in the greater world, and that is an inspiring aspect.”

— Richard P. Feynman

292. “From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”

— Richard P. Feynman

293. “I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it – an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.”

— Richard P. Feynman

294. “Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles.”

— Richard P. Feynman

295. “This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in – a trial and error system.”

— Richard P. Feynman

296. “That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!”

— Richard P. Feynman

297. “So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!”

— Richard P. Feynman

298. “But if you’ve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease – the delight in being able to see how much you can do.”

— Richard P. Feynman

299. “What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.”

— Richard P. Feynman

300. “If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”

— Richard P. Feynman