Richard Feynman Quotes
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God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
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Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.
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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.
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Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
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This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.
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Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.
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In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple.... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time.... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.
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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.
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When things are going well, something will go wrong. / When things just can't get any worse, they will. / Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
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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.
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We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing.
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Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
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No man is rich who is unsatisfied, but who wants nothing possess his heart's desire.
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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.
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It's amazing how many people even today use a computer to do something you can do with a pencil and paper in less time.
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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.
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Why make yourself miserable saying things like, "Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?" - all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.
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The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.
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I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax!
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The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.
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The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
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There’s so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it’s almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.
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I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith.
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In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio.