Richard Feynman Quotes

"If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough."

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there."

"Nature cannot be fooled."

"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

"The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

"There is plenty of room at the bottom."

"Knowing the name of something is different from knowing something."

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

"The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things."

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

"Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter."

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."

"We are lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries."

"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to."

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."

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

"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."

"I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

"Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain."

"The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting."

"Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment."

"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks."

"A great deal more is known than has been proved."

"Whatever we look at, if we look at it closely enough, we are involved in the entire universe."

"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."

"I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why."

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there."

"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."

"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."