Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.
Interpretation
Winning a Nobel Prize is significant, but achieving it with an average IQ highlights the importance of creativity and unconventional thinking.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman emphasizes that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is not the sole determinant of success. Rather, it suggests that creativity, determination, and the ability to think outside conventional norms are crucial for achieving remarkable feats, such as winning a Nobel Prize, even if one's IQ is considered average.
In practice
In a speech about innovative thinking in science and research.
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?
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.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
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.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It's doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile.
When you play this game twenty years, go to bat ten-thousand times, and get three-thousand hits, do you know what that means? You've gone zero for seven-thousand.
If I'd had a great level of success early on, who knows how I would have responded. I might have been a complete jerk.
Everything I have, I owe to baseball and the Dodgers.
Let men of all ranks whether they are successful, or unsuccessful, whether they triumph or not; let them do their duty, and rest satisfied.
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