Top 100 Richard Feynman Quotes
#1. If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
Richard Feynman
#2. 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 Feynman
#3. The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read.
Richard Feynman
#7. You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird ... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing
that's what counts.
Richard Feynman
#8. The little cathedral made with matchsticks is attracted to the earth, so to make a comparison the big cathedral should be attracted to an even bigger earth. Too bad. A bigger earth would attract it even more, and the sticks would break even more surely!
Richard Feynman
#9. We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers ... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?
Richard Feynman
#10. The conservation of energy is a little more difficult, because this time we have a number which is not changed in time, but this number does not represent any particular thing. I
Richard Feynman
#11. Professor Feynman?" "Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?" "I thought you'd like to know that you've won the Nobel Prize." "Yeah, but I'm sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning." - and I hung up.
Richard Feynman
#12. I dedicate this lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man as myself can make. I wish, therefore, to destroy any image of authority that has previously been generated.
Richard Feynman
#13. (Joan,1941) She wrote me a letter asking,"How can I read it?,Its so hard." I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did
Richard Feynman
#14. I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I do not understand it in terms of something you are more familiar with.
Richard Feynman
#15. You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.
Richard Feynman
#16. Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspiration to the arts and to many other activities of human beings.
Richard Feynman
#17. 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.
Richard Feynman
#18. The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry ... The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
Richard Feynman
#19. I think we should teach them [the people] wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more.
Richard Feynman
#20. You just have to know what the right laws are under the right circumstances, and design the device with the correct laws. You cannot expect old designs to work in new circumstances. But new designs can work in new circumstances ...
Richard Feynman
#21. To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back.
Richard Feynman
#22. We are so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing alive on it. And in most places in the universe today there probably is nothing alive.
Richard Feynman
#23. 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 Feynman
#24. To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
Richard Feynman
#25. I love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn't want to chance ruining the machine.
Richard Feynman
#26. All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In
Richard Feynman
#28. But the motion to keep the planet going in a straight line has no known reason. The reason why things coast for ever has never been found out. The law of inertia has no known origin. Although
Richard Feynman
#29. Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
Richard Feynman
#30. The laws of physics could be like an onion, with new laws becoming operational as we probe new scales. We simply don't know!
Richard Feynman
#31. But if you believe in the truth of the healing, then you are responsible to investigate
Richard Feynman
#32. I suppose Galileo felt that the discovery of the fact that the laws of nature are not unchanged under change of scale was as important as his laws of motion, because they are both put together in the tome on Two New Sciences.
Richard Feynman
#33. Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Richard Feynman
#34. Raios cubicos!" he says, with a vengeance. Cube roots!
Richard Feynman
#35. 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 Feynman
#36. I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.
Richard Feynman
#37. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
Richard Feynman
#38. frogs are made of the same 'goup' as rocks, only in different arrangements. So
Richard Feynman
#39. The things that mattered were honesty, independence, willingness to admit ignorance.
Richard Feynman
#40. it is our capacity to doubt that will determine the future of civilization.
Richard Feynman
#41. You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons," they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron.
Richard Feynman
#42. That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.
Richard Feynman
#43. The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure!
Richard Feynman
#44. If we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.
Richard Feynman
#45. Adjustment of constants to make everything fit - that I couldn't be sure it was very useful. I wanted a rather deeper understanding
Richard Feynman
#46. I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way - by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
Richard Feynman
#47. CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS,
THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS
AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL
THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY OF COMBINATIONS
Richard Feynman
#48. I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That's their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
#49. Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don't know what's true, we're trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.
Richard Feynman
#50. The price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense.
Richard Feynman
#51. Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
Richard Feynman
#52. A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.
Richard Feynman
#53. If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul.
Richard Feynman
#54. Thus light is something like raindrops-each little lump of light is called a photon-and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same size.
Richard Feynman
#55. To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.
And so it is with science.
Richard Feynman
#56. You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
#57. I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
Richard Feynman
#58. When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should
you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but
then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never
mind - nothing is going to change your mind.
Richard Feynman
#59. The probability of an event is always represented by a single final arrow-no matter how many arrows were drawn, multiplied, and added to achieve it.
Richard Feynman
#60. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
#61. We are lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries.
Richard Feynman
#62. Keep an open mind - but not so open that your brain falls out.
Richard Feynman
#63. I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax
Richard Feynman
#64. I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys
but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
Richard Feynman
#65. When we add all the numbers together, from all the different forms of energy, it always gives the same total. But as far as we know there are no real units, no little ballbearings. It
Richard Feynman
#66. THE QUESTION IS, OF COURSE, IS IT GOING TO BE POSSIBLE TO AMALGAMATE EVERYTHING,
AND MERELY DISCOVER THAT THIS WORLD REPRESENTS DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ONE THING?
Richard Feynman
#67. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Richard Feynman
#68. angular momentum appears in two forms : one of them is angular momentum of motion, and the other is angular momentum in electric and magnetic fields. There is angular momentum in the field around the magnet, although it does not appear as motion, and this has the opposite sign to the spin. If
Richard Feynman
#70. Innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world
Richard Feynman
#71. The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
Richard Feynman
#72. At first it appears as if the law of conservation is false, but energy has the tendency to hide from us and we need thermometers and other instruments to make sure that it is still there. We
Richard Feynman
#73. You have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.
Richard Feynman
#74. No phenomenon directly involving a frequency has yet been detected above approximately 10^12 cycles per second. We only deduce the higher frequencies from the energy of the particles, by a rule which assumes that the particle-wave idea of quantum mechanics is valid.
Richard Feynman
#76. Nobody understands the world they're in, but some people are better off at it than others.
Richard Feynman
#77. We find that energy is conserved no matter how complex the process, even when we do not know the detailed laws.
Richard Feynman
#79. 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 Feynman
#80. Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
Richard Feynman
#81. I've found out since that such people don't know what they're doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism.
Richard Feynman
#82. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman
#83. 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 Feynman
#84. You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.
Richard Feynman
#85. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas
Richard Feynman
#86. You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight ... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
Richard Feynman
#88. I won't have anything to do with the Nobel Prize ... it's a pain in the ... (LAUGHS). I don't like honors.
Richard Feynman
#89. 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 Feynman
#90. I'm not responsible for what other people think I am able to do; I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good.
Richard Feynman
#91. 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 Feynman
#92. My rule is, when you are unhappy, think about it. But when you're unhappy, don't. Why spoil it? You're probably happy for some ridiculous reason and you'd just spoil it to know it.
Richard Feynman
#93. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, Ooh! It's just like fucking!
Richard Feynman
#94. It is probably better to realize that the probability concept is in a sense subjective, that it is always based on uncertain knowledge, and that its quantitative evaluation is subject to change as we obtain more information.
Richard Feynman
#95. So I started to think: "How can that happen?" ... So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!" I say, "I'm thinking!
Richard Feynman
#96. Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
Richard Feynman
#97. Mysteries like these repeating cycles make it very interesting to be a theoretical physicist: Nature gives us such wonderful puzzles! Why does She repeat the electron at 206 times and 3,640 times its mass?
Richard Feynman
#99. Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Richard Feynman
#100. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
Richard Feynman
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