Richard Feynman

The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

There were a lot of fools at that conference — pompous fools — and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools — guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus — THAT, I CANNOT STAND!

And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!"<P>It was a brilliant idea: 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.

Perhaps, and perhaps not.

Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

We could, of course, use any notation we want; do not laugh at notations; invent them, they are powerful. In fact,mathematics is, to a large extent, invention of better notations.

You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

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 that might be wrong.

"How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagina-tion — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part — perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why ? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it ? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist.

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.

Conservation just means that it does not change.

Professor Feynman?” “Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?” “I thought you’d like to know that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.” “Yeah, but I’m sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning.” — and I hung up.

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

I believe there's nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who's got the hallucination.