Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

260. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

265. “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

266. “With quantum physics, who needs drugs?”

— Richard P. Feynman

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.”

— Richard P. Feynman

273. “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

274. “He detested hierarchy and enjoyed the friendship of people in all walks of life. He was, like Shakespeare, an actor with a talent for comedy.”

— Richard P. Feynman

275. “It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

— Richard P. Feynman

276. “My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.”

— Richard P. Feynman

277. “So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. 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

278. “But, of course, a child won’t learn what you teach him.”

— Richard P. Feynman

279. “I’ve learned how to live without knowing. I don’t have to be sure I’m succeeding, and as I said before about science, I think my life is fuller because I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m delighted with the width of the world!”

— Richard P. Feynman

280. “All things, even ourselves, are made of fine-grained, enormously strongly interacting plus and minus parts, all neatly balanced out.”

— Richard P. Feynman

281. “This was a tremendous idea – that to find something out, it is better to perform some careful experiments than to carry on deep philosophical arguments.”

— Richard P. Feynman

282. “If we look away from the science and look at the world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: that the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific.”

— Richard P. Feynman

283. “Have you read anywhere, by any poet, anything about time that compares with real time, with the long, slow process of evolution?”

— Richard P. Feynman

284. “I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.”

— Richard P. Feynman

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

292. “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

293. “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

294. “No one really understands quantum mechanics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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