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

Richard P. Feynman

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" 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

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" I don't believe in honors - it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. "

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" 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. "

Richard P. Feynman

" It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere - like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department - I would draw the other people. "

Richard P. Feynman

" I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions. "

Richard P. Feynman

" The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation? "

Richard P. Feynman

" It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself. "

Richard P. Feynman

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

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 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

" 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

" It has been discovered that all the world is made of the same atoms, that the stars are of the same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life come from, or where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from? "

Richard P. Feynman

" People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about one of the theories that we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don't know. "

Richard P. Feynman

" We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries - and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate? "

Richard P. Feynman

" There were several possible solutions of the difficulty of classical electrodynamics, any one of which might serve as a good starting point to the solution of the difficulties of quantum electrodynamics. "

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

" 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

" What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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" I want to marry Arline because I love her - which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it. I want to take care of her. I am anxious for the responsibilities and uncertainties of taking care of the girl I love. "

Richard P. Feynman

" Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. "

Richard P. Feynman