Top 34 Mr Feynman Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Mr Feynman

#1. [Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.

#2. 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

#3. The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.

Richard P. Feynman

#4. This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!

Richard Feynman

#5. It was a brilliant idea: 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. It

Richard Feynman

#6. 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

#7. I don't like honors ... I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things.

Richard P. Feynman

#8. 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

#9. The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory.

Richard P. Feynman

#10. You can't fool nature.

Richard Feynman

#11. Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person.

Richard P. Feynman

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.

Richard P. Feynman

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself.

Richard P. Feynman

#18. But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.

Richard P. Feynman

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

Richard P. Feynman

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work - not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

Richard P. Feynman

#25. In the Raphael Room, the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.

Richard P. Feynman

#26. All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.

Richard P. Feynman

#27. Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.

Richard P. Feynman

#28. 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

#29. 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