Richard Phillips Feynman, (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga. Richard Feynman quotes on life, learning, curiosity, physics, and education will inspire you to achieve success in life.
Best Richard Feynman Quotes
- “The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.” – Richard P. Feynman, Richard Feynman quotes on life
- “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.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “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 P. Feynman
- “There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I thought one should have the attitude of ‘What do you care what other people think!’.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still, there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“Fall in love with some activity and do it!”
- “I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.” – Richard P. Feynman, Richard Feynman quotes on learning
- “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a ‘should’ involved, and this cannot be worked out from, ‘If I do this, what will happen?’ alone.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Before I was born, my father told my mother, ‘If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist’.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I’ve always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Quarks came in a number of varieties – in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks – they are called u-type, d-type, s-type.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The first amazing fact about gravitation is that the ratio of inertial mass to gravitational mass is constant wherever we have checked it. The second amazing thing about gravitation is how weak it is.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s!” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone – both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The universe is very large, and its boundaries are not known very well, but it is still possible to define some kind of a radius to be associated with it.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.” – Richard P. Feynman, Richard Feynman quotes on education
- “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?” – Richard P. Feynman
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“Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind – this attitude of uncertainty – is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.” – Richard P. Feynman, Richard Feynman quotes on physics
- “With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “I don’t believe in honors – it bothers me. Honors bother: honors are epaulets; honors are uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “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 P. Feynman
- “Working out another system to replace Newton’s laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one’s common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.” – Richard P. Feynman
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“What one fool can understand, another can.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “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 uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask “Why are we here?” 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 the mysterious universe without having any purpose – which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell.” – Richard P. Feynman
- “We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.” – Richard P. Feynman
