“I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”
Richard Feynman (verified)
Horizon: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Primary source)
A candid 1981 BBC interview where Richard Feynman reflects on curiosity, discovery, honors, scientific thinking, and the deep personal joy he finds in understanding how the world works.
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“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. 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 certainty about different things, but I’m 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, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”
Richard Feynman (verified)
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
— Richard Feynman (verified)“Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something.”
— Richard Feynman (verified)“Knowledge is of no real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow.”
— Richard Feynman (verified)“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”
— Richard Feynman (verified)More quotes by Richard Feynman →
“If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question [of whether you are past the boundary] is to answer it.”
— Charlie Munger (verified)“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
— Ernest Hemingway (verified)“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
— Richard Feynman (verified)“You’re much more likely to do well if you start out to do something feasible instead of something that isn’t feasible. Isn’t that perfectly obvious?”
— Charlie Munger (verified)