Richard P. Feynman
Science is uncertain.Collection: Uncertain
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.Collection: Heart
The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.Collection: Play
Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.Collection: Ambition
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.Collection: Graduation
Few people realize the number of things that are possible.Collection: Numbers
It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.Collection: Freedom
If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.Collection: Learning
The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory , you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty .Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Thinking
No man is rich who is unsatisfied, but who wants nothing possess his heart's desire.Collection: Heart
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.Collection: Real
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!Collection: Inspirational
The electron is a theory. But the theory is so good we can almost consider them real.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Attitude
Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.Collection: Language
I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.Collection: Thinking
It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them ... [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.Collection: Angel
If you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid - not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.Collection: Thinking
Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.Collection: Doe
Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.Collection: Simple
If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honesty in reporting results—the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been—and finally—an important thing—the intelligence to interpret the results.Collection: Honesty
I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.Collection: Matter
The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.Collection: Creating
To test whether you have learned an idea or a definition, rephrase what you just learned without using the new word.Collection: Ideas
If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.Collection: Discovery
I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.Collection: Teaching
The same equations have the same solutionsCollection: Equations
The other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosing leaders - in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth or lying in order to develop a product.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Writing
The unanswerable mysteries... the attitude that all is uncertain... to summarize it - the humility of the intellect.Collection: Attitude
I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS.Collection: Trying
Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.Collection: Different
It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Philosophy
This is not yet a scientific age.Collection: Age
The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.Collection: Mean
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.Collection: Marijuana
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.Collection: Philosophical
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.Collection: Ignorance
To do any important work in physics a very good mathematical ability and aptitude are required. Some work in applications can be done without this, but it will not be very inspired. If you must satisfy your "personal curiosity concerning the mysteries of nature" what will happen if these mysteries turn out to be laws expressed in mathematical terms (as they do turn out to be)? You cannot understand the physical world in any deep or satisfying way without using mathematical reasoning with facility.Collection: Law
That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.Collection: Science
Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.Collection: Science
To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.Collection: Failure
Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.Collection: Science
Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.Collection: Responsibility
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell.Collection: Mean
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.Collection: Inspirational