“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“I think that to keep trying new solutions is the way to do everything.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“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 Primary source“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 Primary source“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come 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.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Every scientific law, every scientific principle, every statement of the results of an observation is some kind of a summary which leaves out details.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“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 Primary source“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“There is no sense in calculating the probability or the chance that something happens after it happens.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Technical people love to discuss technical problems with technical people who might have an opinion or a suggestion that could be useful.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Peace of mind is the most important prerequisite for creative work.”
— Richard Feynman Secondary source“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Since then I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could he educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“It was a reaction I learned from my father: have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, Is it reasonable?”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“It is interesting that human relationships, if there is an independent way of judging truth, can become unargumentative.”
— Richard Feynman Primary sourceMarie Curie Albert Einstein Thomas Edison Charlie Munger Archimedes