Richard P. Feynman

Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.

I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.

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.

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.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!'

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

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.

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

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!

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.

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the _x000D_ sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.