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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Nobody yet knows how dogs work.”

— Richard P. Feynman

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— 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. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

327. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

335. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman