Inspirational Quotes
Words to motivate, inspire, and guide you.
Richard P. Feynman Quotes
AcceptanceMoving ForwardOvercoming DoubtProductivity 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.
InterconnectionNatureOrganizationPatternsUnity 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.
PowerResponsibilityValue 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.
IndividualityInquiryUnderstanding 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.
Behavior Of ParticlesPerception Of RealityQuantum MechanicsSubatomic WorldUncertainty Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.
HumilityKnowledgeProgress 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.
LimitationProgressQuantum MechanicsTheoryUnderstanding 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.
InvestigationMysteriesPhysics 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?
EnergyGravitationScientific PrincipleUniversality All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.
PerceptionProblemUncertainty 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.
GravitationMysteryUnderstanding Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.
DiscoveryEnjoymentPractice 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.
Artificial IntelligenceHuman-Computer InteractionPrecision 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.
Open-mindednessScience I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
ObservationPhilosophyRealityTruth 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?
Cosmic UnityExistential QuestionsFundamental ElementsInterconnectednessOrigin of Matter 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?
EvidenceKnowledgeTruthValidation 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.
CreativityHuman PotentialInnovationLimitlessnessNature See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
DutyEthical ReasoningMoralityPrinciple 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.
Family InfluenceHumilityInner StrengthSelf-Identity I don't believe in honors - it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.
ConfidenceDeterminationFreedom From JudgmentIndependenceSelf Reliance I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!'
CourageDiscoveryInnovationInspirationPhysics When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.
AchievementComplexityExcellence If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
Cultural Differences Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party.
ClarityDirectionKnowledgePurpose 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.
InnovationOriginalityPerseverancePioneering If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!
DiscoveryKnowledgeLearning ProcessMemoryMystery 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.
BeautyPerceptionScienceWonder 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?
Learning Approach 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.