Quotes by Richard Feynman

“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...”

“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.”

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

“Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.”

“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?”

“When things are going well, something will go wrong.When things just cant get any worse, they will.Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.”

Physics isnt the most important thing. Love is.

All the time youre saying to yourself, I could do that, but I wont, — which is just another way of saying that you cant.

People often think Im a faker, but Im usually honest, in a certain way--in such a way that often nobody believes me!

I couldnt claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

– and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. Its a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if its an even number you do this, if its an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasnt paying any attention; he wasnt supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if youve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.

I have a friend whos an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I dont agree with very well. Hell hold up a flower and say look how beautiful it is, and Ill agree. Then he says I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing, and I think that hes kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean its not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; theres also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I dont understand how it subtracts.

I think its 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 and there are many things I dont know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why were here. I dont have to know an answer. I dont feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

It doesnt 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.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Theres a kind of saying that you dont understand its meaning, I dont believe it. Its too crazy. Im not going to accept it.… Youll have to accept it. Its the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, thats the way it looks. You dont like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I cant help it, okay? If Im going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.

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.