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Richard Feynman

230 quotes

“We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: note (c. 1945), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 204
“Principles You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: note (c. 1948), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 5 (repeated p. 283)
“I had too much stuff. My machines came from too far away.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reflecting on the failure of his presentation at the "Pocono Conference" of 30 March - 1 April 1948.
“The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: letter to Robert Bacher (6 April 1950), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 278
“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: statement (1959), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 372
“Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: statement (c. 1965), quoted in "An irreverent best-seller by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gives nerds a good name", People Magazine (22 July 1985)
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to 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.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics," Nobel Lecture (11 December 1965)
“A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics," Nobel Lecture (11 December 1965)
“The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction — a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory — who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics," Nobel Lecture (11 December 1965)
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: address "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320
“I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: address "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320
“Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: address "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320
“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: address "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320
“We've learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 342
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964)
“The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger!”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lecture 1. "Photons: Corpuscles of Light" (1979) Sir Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, University of Auckland.
“Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough!”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Note to the mother of Marcus Chown, who had admired the profile of Feynman presented in the BBC TV Horizon program "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981). Written after Chown asked Feynman to write her a birthday n…
“Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Simulating Physics with Computers", International Journal of Theoretical Physics, volume 21, 1982, p. 467-488, at p. 486 (final words)
“One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes a little bit harder to understand things than it would have been if they had been named differently.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Feynman's Computer Heuristics Lecture" (1985)
“I took this stuff I got out of your [O-ring] seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least, and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: statement at hearing by Rogers Commission, 11 February 1986, Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, volume 4, p. 680; also quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynm…
“The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review blurb for the first edition of The Quantum Universe (1987)
“There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from a 1987 class, as quoted in David L. Goodstein, "Richard P. Feynman, Teacher," Physics Today, volume 42, number 2 (February 1989) p. 70-75, at p. 73
“I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: last words (15 February 1988), according to James Gleick, in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), p. 438
“This dying is boring.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: last words (15 February 1988), recalled by sister Joan Feynman, in Christopher Sykes, editor, No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman (1994), p. 254
“What I cannot create, I do not understand. ...Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: on his blackboard at the time of death in February 1988. Ref: California Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections. Accessed May 21, 2023.
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from a public lecture; as quoted in David L. Goodstein, "Richard P. Feynman, Teacher," Physics Today, volume 42, number 2 (February 1989) p. 73
“[I call myself] an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response when asked whether he called himself an atheist or an agnostic. The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries by Denis Brian (1995), Basic Books, p. 49.
“Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: recalled by Carver Mead in Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism (2002), p. xix
“Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Lawrence M. Krauss, Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed (1993), p. 27
“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know — then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. ... The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, "You don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says, "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally, we make some remarks on why linear systems are so important. The answer is simple: because we can solve them! So most of the time we solve linear problems. Second (and most important), it turns out that the fundamental laws of physics are often linear. The Maxwell equations for the laws of electricity are linear, for example. The great laws of quantum mechanics turn out, so far as we know, to be linear equations. That is why we spend so much time on linear equations: because if we understand linear equations, we are ready, in principle, to understand a lot of things.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many interesting phenomena ... which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The same equations have the same solutions”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope ... that you will find someday that, after all, it isn't as horrible as it looks.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps you will not only have some appreciation of this culture; it is even possible that you may want to join in the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source