You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.
Interpretation
Embracing uncertainty allows for a more flexible understanding of knowledge and beliefs.
In this quote, Richard P. Feynman expresses the idea that living with doubt and uncertainty is acceptable and even beneficial. He suggests that having varying degrees of confidence in our beliefs can enrich our understanding of the world, rather than hinder it. By acknowledging that not everything can be known with absolute certainty, one can approach life with a more open and inquisitive mindset, finding comfort in ambiguity.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a discussion about scientific inquiry and the nature of knowledge.
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.
Our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful inns for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home.
Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to out deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.
The people must fight for their laws as for their walls.
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.
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