Richard P. Feynman Quotes

American - Physicist May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

Richard P. Feynman

Life, Flower, Colors, Aesthetic, See

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard P. Feynman

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard P. Feynman

Yourself, Fool, You, Person, First, Must

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

Richard P. Feynman

Attitude, Great, Live, Mind, Value, Know

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting: the part that doesn't go according to what you expected.

Richard P. Feynman

You, Interesting, Go, Most, Part, Thing

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard P. Feynman

Nature, Small, Organization, Only, Her

Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.

Richard P. Feynman

Clouds, Experience, Small, You, Waves

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Richard P. Feynman

Future, Time, Responsibility, Beginning

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Richard P. Feynman

Nature, Beautiful, Mistake, Walk, Ideas

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!

Richard P. Feynman

Knowledge, People, Understanding, Way

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.

Richard P. Feynman

Beautiful, Smart, You, Wrong, Matter

Top 10
Richard P. Feynman
Quotes

Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party.

Richard P. Feynman

Good, Beer, Think, Serious, Place, Party

If you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

Richard P. Feynman

Time, Experience, Together, You, Realize

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

Richard P. Feynman

Stars, Earth, Discovery, Kind, Same

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Richard P. Feynman

Nature, Technology, Reality, Over, Take

Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

Richard P. Feynman

Other, Far, Understandable, Terms

Before I was born, my father told my mother, 'If it's a boy, he's going to be a scientist.'

Richard P. Feynman

Father, Mother, Boy, Born, I Was Born

It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.

Richard P. Feynman

Curious, Historical, Different, Two

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

Richard P. Feynman

Day, Computers, Will, One Day, Things

What one fool can understand, another can.

Richard P. Feynman

Fool, Understand, Another

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

Richard P. Feynman

Nature, Problems, Weakness, New, Trying

It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Richard P. Feynman

Work, Yourself, Words, You, Understand

I want to marry Arline because I love her - which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it. I want to take care of her. I am anxious for the responsibilities and uncertainties of taking care of the girl I love.

Richard P. Feynman

Love, Girl, I Am, Take Care, Care, Want

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

Richard P. Feynman

Man, Courage, Hero, Physics, New, Doing

I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!'

Richard P. Feynman

Attitude, People, Thought, Think, You

I've always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.

Richard P. Feynman

Science, Effort, Always, Very, Been

It has been discovered that all the world is made of the same atoms, that the stars are of the same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life come from, or where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from?

Richard P. Feynman

Life, Stars, World, Earth, Question, Our

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Related Authors

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Lawrence M. Krauss

Austin O'Malley

Murray Gell-Mann

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