Richard Feynman

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

“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.”

“We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!”

“PrinciplesYou can't say A is made of Bor vice versa.All mass is interaction.”

“I had too much stuff. My machines came from too far away.”

“The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.”

“Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.”

“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.”

“A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.”

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

“Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.”

“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.”

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

“Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough!”

“Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.”

“One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes a little bit harder to understand things than it would have been if they had been named differently.”

“The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway.”

“There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

“I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.”

“What I cannot create, I do not understand. ...Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”

“[I call myself] an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.”

“Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!”

“Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.”

“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.”

“If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know — then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.”

“If an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.”

“It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way.”

“We cannot define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, "You don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says, "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?"”

“So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.”

“The same equations have the same solutions”