Prof. Feynman

If you're not having fun, you're not learning. There's a pleasure in finding things out.

First rule of understanding: Admit you don’t.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.

If it makes you happy it doesn't have to make sense to others.

The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.

Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting: the part that doesn't go according to what you expected.

The more you teach, the better you learn. Teaching is a powerful tool for learning.

Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.

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

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.

For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong.

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

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does with it.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. ... The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”.

I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?