Richard Feynman Quotes

283 Sourced Quotes

The universality of the deep chemistry of living things is indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing. And all the time we human beings have been too proud to even recognize our kinship with the animals.

Richard Feynman
The rules that describe nature seem to be mathematical.... Why nature is mathematical is, again, a mystery.

Richard Feynman
No problem can be solved without it dragging in its wake new problems to be solved.

Richard Feynman
I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

Richard Feynman
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.

Richard Feynman
But logic is not all, one needs one's heart to follow an idea.

Richard Feynman
What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.

Richard Feynman
Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.

Richard Feynman
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.

Richard Feynman
As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.

Richard Feynman
So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!

Richard Feynman
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.

Richard Feynman
The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that.

Richard Feynman
We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries... The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.

Richard Feynman
The principle that the observation is the judge imposes a severe limitation to the kind of questions that can be answered. They are limited to questions that you can put this way: "if I do this, what will happen?" There are ways to try and see. Questions like, "should I do this?" and "what is the value of this?" are not of the same kind.

Richard Feynman
Sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

Richard Feynman
One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much.

Richard Feynman
John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?

Richard Feynman
See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. No one who did not have some inkling of this through observations could ever have imagined such a marvel as nature is.

Richard Feynman
We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery.

Richard Feynman
In any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion... fence sitting is an art, and it's difficult, and it's important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It's just better to have action, isn't it than to sit on the fence? Not if you're not sure which way to go, it isn't.

Richard Feynman
This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless sea of the other ideas — just as mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic pictures that came before.

Richard Feynman
The idea that it [science] takes away mystery or awe or wonder in nature is wrong. It's quite the opposite. It's much more wonderful to know what something's really like than to sit there and just simply, in ignorance, say, "Oooh, isn't it wonderful!"

Richard Feynman
I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession.

Richard Feynman
The vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that infinity of other truths of which he understands nothing.

Richard Feynman
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.

Richard Feynman
The electron does anything it likes. It goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes...

Richard Feynman
I think the problem is not to find the best or most efficient method to proceed to a discovery, but to find any method at all.

Richard Feynman
I want to emphasize that light comes in this form — particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave — like particles.

Richard Feynman
Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative.

Richard Feynman