Richard Feynman

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

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

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

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature.

It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places.

The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough.

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis...

We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be.

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

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... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts.

The only way to learn anything is to be active about it.

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'.

It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, 'Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next?' ... But that is not the way imagination is used in science.

The only way to have success in science is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be.

I don't believe in honors. It bothers me. Honors is epaulettes. Honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can't stand it. It hurts me.

There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.

The problem is not to find the best or most efficient method to proceed to a discovery, but to find any method at all.

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is — absurd.