20 Great Quotes By Richard Feynman

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!“, one of the famous Richard Feynman quotes

Richard Feynman born in 1918 in the New York City was an author, graphic novel hero, intellectual, philosopher, physicist, and No Ordinary Genius. He is considered to be one of the most important physicists of all time.

As a result of his charismatic personality and his humorous way of life, he is still one of the most famous physicists.

Feynman is known in the scientific community for his work in the development of quantum electrodynamics. This work won him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga.

Feynman played a major role in the development of Nuclear bombs during World War-II by developing a formula to calculate the yield of a fission bomb.

Feynman is remembered till date because of his unmatched teaching skills. He was a really good teacher who could break and explain things at the most fundamental level possible. Feynman technique is still followed to learn things. Feynman lectures, a set of three books is still one of the most popular physics books and portrays his teaching ability. (More than 1.5 million English-language copies of these books have been sold)

Apart from all this, Feynman’s quotes are also very popular. So, let us look at 20 great quotes by Richard Feynman and try to gain some insights into his perspective towards this universe.

20 Quotes by Feynman

1. “If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.”

2. “All the time you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could do that, but I won’t,’ — which is just another way of saying that you can’t”

3. “Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?“

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

5. “Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

6. 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.

7. “If you want to master something, teach it”

8. “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

9. “Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”

10. “The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.”

11. “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”

12. “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.”

13. “We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

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

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

16. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”

17. “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!“

18. “The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be’.”

19. “See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”

20. “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.”

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