Richard P. Feynman
People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.Collection: People
When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion... Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it... So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.Collection: Stupid
I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.Collection: Play
The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.Collection: Real
A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.Collection: Knowledge
I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good.Collection: Thinking
An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!Collection: Ordinary
There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time ... On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.Collection: Believe
We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be... She's always got better imagination than we have.Collection: Imagination
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.Collection: Problem
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.Collection: Effort
We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.Collection: Swimming
But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.Collection: Inevitability Of Death
Since then I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself.Collection: Experts
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.Collection: Light
Light is something like raindrops each little lump of light is called a photon and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same.Collection: Light
All we know so far is what doesn't work.Collection: Knows
Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from.Collection: Understanding
[B]eyond poverty, beyond the point that the material needs are reasonably satisfied, only from within is peace.Collection: Needs
A philosopher once said, 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.' Well, they don't!Collection: Philosopher
You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.Collection: Teacher
You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.Collection: Vices
Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty.Collection: Spiritual
Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.Collection: Doe
It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.Collection: Tables
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.Collection: Fooling Ourselves
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.Collection: Funny
So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.Collection: Law
This is not very important what I'm doing. I'm just proving something.Collection: Science
I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.Collection: Death
I don't like honors. I'm appreciated for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that other physicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else.... 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. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors... I can't stand it, it hurts me.Collection: Hurt
I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.Collection: Fake People
Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Distance
If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.Collection: Years
[When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology] it isn't that [through the obtaining of real knowledge that] he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all.Collection: Real
I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.Collection: I Can
When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.Collection: Doubt
Today's brains are yesterday's mashed potatoes.Collection: Yesterday
The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter - but it's a damn good book anyway.Collection: Book
You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons", they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron."Collection: Two
I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher - a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal.Collection: Teacher
I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Principles
I don't feel frightened by not knowing things.Collection: Mysterious Universe
So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.Collection: Integrity
If you don't like it, go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler.Collection: Somewhere Else
The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.Collection: Learning