Richard Feynman Quotes
20 quotes from Richard Feynman — Nobel Prize-winning physicist known for quantum electrodynamics, the Feynman diagrams, and his work on the Manhattan Pr….
“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.”
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
“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.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“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.”
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
“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.”
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
“Don't pay attention to 'authorities,' think for yourself.”
“He was the most original mind of his generation.”
“That was the beginning, and the idea seemed so obvious to me and so elegant that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her.”
“There are two kinds of geniuses. The ordinary kind does great things but lets other scientists feel that they could do the same if only they worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it.”
“I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.”
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
“I won the prize for shoving a great problem under the carpet, but in this case there was a moment when I knew how nature worked — it had elegance and beauty.”
