Richard Feynman Quotes
-
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?
-
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.
-
All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,'--which is just another way of saying that you can't.
-
God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.
-
The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
-
Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.
-
No man is rich who is unsatisfied, but who wants nothing possess his heart's desire.
-
You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.
-
Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.
-
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.
-
We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, "You don't know what you are talking about!" The second one says, "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?"
-
I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. ... There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.
-
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.
-
It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is
-
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas - which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science.
-
If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question...you may be wrong! It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world.
-
It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.
-
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
-
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
-
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.
-
I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good.