Quotes by Richard Feynman

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really dont know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.

How you get to know is what I want to know.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when youre finished, youll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So lets look at the bird and see what its doing -- thats what counts.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but thats not why we do it.

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

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

Religion is a culture of faith science is a culture of doubt.

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

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 dont understand it. You see my physics students dont understand it... That is because I dont understand it. Nobody does.

I would rather have questions that cant be answered than answers that cant be questioned.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.

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

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.The other students in the class interrupt me: We *know* all that!Oh, I say, you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after youve had four years of biology. They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

So my antagonist said, Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that its impossible? No, I said, I cant prove its impossible. Its just very unlikely. At that he said, You are very unscientific. If you cant prove it impossible then how can you say that its unlikely? But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. Thats their mistake, not my failing.

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.