The voices / 79 fragments

Richard Feynman

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01Undated

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.

Richard Feynman / quote

02Undated

All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.

Richard Feynman / quote

03Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

04Undated

I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

Richard Feynman / quote

05Undated

– 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!

Richard Feynman / quote

06Undated

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's 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 it's an even number you do this, if it's 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 wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't 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 you've 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.

Richard Feynman / quote

07Undated

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll 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 he's 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 it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's 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 don't understand how it subtracts.

Richard Feynman / quote

08Undated

I think it's 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 don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't 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.

Richard Feynman / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

11Undated

There's a kind of saying that you don't understand its meaning, 'I don't believe it. It's too crazy. I'm not going to accept it.'… You'll have to accept it. It's the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, that's the way it looks. You don't like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it, okay? If I'm 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.

Richard Feynman / quote

12Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

13Undated

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.

Richard Feynman / quote

14Undated

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 Feynman / quote

15Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

16Undated

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 don't 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.

Richard Feynman / quote

17Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

18Undated

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

Richard Feynman / quote

19Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

20Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

21Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

22Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

23Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote

24Undated

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

Richard Feynman / quote