Top 300 Richard P. Feynman Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 7

301. “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

302. “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

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. “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

305. “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

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. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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. “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

317. “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

318. “Nobody yet knows how dogs work.”

— Richard P. Feynman

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

325. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

329. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

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

— Richard P. Feynman

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

337. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Richard P. Feynman