Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.”

— Richard P. Feynman

303. “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

304. “I will summarize, then, by saying that electrons arrive in lumps, like particles, but the probability of arrival of these lumps is determined as the intensity of waves would be. It is in this sense that the electron behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave. It behaves in two different ways at the same time.”

— Richard P. Feynman

305. “Murray Gell-Mann countered in the following weeks by giving a beautiful set of six lectures concerning the linguistic relations of all the languages of the world.”

— Richard P. Feynman

306. “When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”

— Richard P. Feynman

307. “But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves – of having utter scientific integrity – is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.”

— Richard P. Feynman

308. “And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the race experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.”

— Richard P. Feynman

309. “Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed.”

— Richard P. Feynman

310. “The supernova of 1987 had just been discovered, and Feynman was very excited about it. He said, “Tycho Brahe had his supernova, and Kepler had his. Then there weren’t any for 400 years.”

— Richard P. Feynman

311. “Nobody yet knows how dogs work.”

— Richard P. Feynman

312. “Buddhist religion: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

314. “You must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. After you’ve not fool yourself, it’s easy not to fool others.”

— Richard P. Feynman

315. “Our freedom to doubt was born of a struggle against authority in the early days of science.”

— Richard P. Feynman

316. “Only with quantitative observations can one arrive at quantitative relationships, which are the heart of physics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

318. “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

319. “Because “extra-difficult popular physics books” scare publishers half to death. Hawking famously said that every equation halves the sale of a popular book.”

— Richard P. Feynman

320. “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

321. “Clearly, peace is a great force, as is sobriety, as are material power, communication, education, honesty, and the ideals of many dreamers.”

— Richard P. Feynman

322. “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

323. “Incidentally, they had a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had – too many wires – and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I’d better not tell about that!”

— Richard P. Feynman

324. “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

325. “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

326. “What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia be silent?”

— Richard P. Feynman

327. “Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand.”

— Richard P. Feynman

328. “When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they’re usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate.”

— Richard P. Feynman

329. “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

330. “Your situation is just an accident of life.”

— Richard P. Feynman

331. “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

332. “Another way to remember their size is this: if an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.”

— Richard P. Feynman

333. “The sciences do not directly teach good and bad.”

— Richard P. Feynman

334. “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

335. “We do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance.”

— Richard P. Feynman

336. “How does science show it–how did the scientists find out–how, what, where?”

— Richard P. Feynman

337. “The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it.”

— Richard P. Feynman

338. “So we see that a substance’s properties must be limited in a certain way; one cannot make up anything he wants, or he would be able to invent a substance which he could use to produce more than the maximum allowable work when he carried it around a reversible cycle. This principle, this limitation, is the only real rule that comes out of the thermodynamics.”

— Richard P. Feynman

339. “We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.”

— Richard P. Feynman

340. “It was the closest thing to science I could find.”

— Richard P. Feynman

341. “A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.”

— Richard P. Feynman

342. “What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.”

— Richard P. Feynman