Top 100 Richard P. Feynman Quotes
#2. 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
#3. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.
Richard P. Feynman
#4. But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.
Richard P. Feynman
#5. Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.
Richard P. Feynman
#7. The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
Richard P. Feynman
#8. God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
Richard P. Feynman
#9. See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
Richard P. Feynman
#10. Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.
Richard P. Feynman
#11. I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.
Richard P. Feynman
#12. I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
Richard P. Feynman
#13. The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Richard P. Feynman
#15. Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.
Richard P. Feynman
#17. People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.
Richard P. Feynman
#18. As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.
Richard P. Feynman
#19. If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week.
Richard P. Feynman
#22. I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
Richard P. Feynman
#23. To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.
Richard P. Feynman
#24. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.
Richard P. Feynman
#25. To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.
Richard P. Feynman
#26. While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.
Richard P. Feynman
#27. The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity - and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Richard P. Feynman
#28. We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough, we're okay.
Richard P. Feynman
#29. In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.
Richard P. Feynman
#31. I think we can safely assume that no one understands quantum mechanics.
Richard P. Feynman
#32. A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy . However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.
Richard P. Feynman
#33. When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.
Richard P. Feynman
#34. Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
Richard P. Feynman
#35. There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.
Richard P. Feynman
#36. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.
Richard P. Feynman
#37. The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.
Richard P. Feynman
#38. I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere - like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department - I would draw the other people.
Richard P. Feynman
#39. 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
#40. When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.
Richard P. Feynman
#42. We are not to tell nature what she's gotta be. She's always got better imagination than we have.
Richard P. Feynman
#45. It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
Richard P. Feynman
#46. I've always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.
Richard P. Feynman
#47. There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
Richard P. Feynman
#48. It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.
Richard P. Feynman
#49. I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!'
Richard P. Feynman
#50. Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
Richard P. Feynman
#52. The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.
Richard P. Feynman
#54. I want to marry Arline because I love her - which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it. I want to take care of her. I am anxious for the responsibilities and uncertainties of taking care of the girl I love.
Richard P. Feynman
#56. If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood .
Richard P. Feynman
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.
Richard P. Feynman
#61. Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!"
Richard P. Feynman
#62. Since then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself.
Richard P. Feynman
#63. The most important thing I found out from [my father] is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind.
Richard P. Feynman
#64. 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
#65. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.
Richard P. Feynman
#66. Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.
Richard P. Feynman
#68. If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!
Richard P. Feynman
#69. A scientist is never certain ... We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning.
Richard P. Feynman
#70. The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter - but it's a damn good book anyway.
Richard P. Feynman
#72. We have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know.
Richard P. Feynman
#73. People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain way - in such a way that often nobody believes me!
Richard P. Feynman
#74. 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
#75. The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.
Richard P. Feynman
#76. It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.
Richard P. Feynman
#77. Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?"
Richard P. Feynman
#78. I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS.
Richard P. Feynman
#80. Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.
Richard P. Feynman
#81. Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter.
Richard P. Feynman
#82. There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.
Richard P. Feynman
#83. If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
Richard P. Feynman
#84. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.
Richard P. Feynman
#85. Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.
Richard P. Feynman
#86. What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?
Richard P. Feynman
#87. The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?
Richard P. Feynman
#88. 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
#89. If an apple was magnified to the size of the Earth, then the atoms in the apple would be approximately the size of the original apple.
Richard P. Feynman
#93. I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard P. Feynman
#95. We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
Richard P. Feynman
#96. If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honesty in reporting results - the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been - and finally - an important thing - the intelligence to interpret the results.
Richard P. Feynman
#98. Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.
Richard P. Feynman
#99. Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.
Richard P. Feynman
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