Inspirational Quotes
Words to motivate, inspire, and guide you.
Richard P. Feynman Quotes
ProgressHumilityKnowledge 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.
ProblemUncertaintyPerception 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.
ScienceApplicationPowerProgressInnovation The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.
FocusDedication I've always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.
DistractionProductivityFocusDiscipline There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
ApproximationTruthKnowledgeUncertainty 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.
Self-awarenessHonestyTruth The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
HonestyPerceptionBeliefMisunderstanding 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!
TransparencyObjectivityFairnessContribution The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
ExcellenceAchievementComplexity If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
LifeInterconnectednessChemistryBeauty The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
PowerValueResponsibility Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.
MysteriesPhysicsInvestigation We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries - and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?
SciencePhysicsQuarks Quarks came in a number of varieties - in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks - they are called u-type, d-type, s-type.
PracticeDiscoveryEnjoyment You're unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.
ScienceBeautyPerceptionWonder Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
ScienceReasoningLogicNatureChallenge Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.
PhysicsObservationUnderstandingDiscovery We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.
GravityPhysicsScience The first amazing fact about gravitation is that the ratio of inertial mass to gravitational mass is constant wherever we have checked it. The second amazing thing about gravitation is how weak it is.
ArtLearningAppreciation Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.
PurposeKnowledgeClarityDirection 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.
ChangeTransformationSurpriseDiscovery 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.
Cosmic UnityOrigin of MatterInterconnectednessFundamental ElementsExistential Questions It has been discovered that all the world is made of the same atoms, that the stars are of the same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life come from, or where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from?
Overcoming DoubtProductivityAcceptanceMoving Forward Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
InnovationPerseveranceOriginalityPioneering If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!
MoralityPrincipleDutyEthical Reasoning In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a 'should' involved, and this cannot be worked out from, 'If I do this, what will happen?' alone.
TheoryUnderstandingQuantum MechanicsProgressLimitation Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter.
TruthEvidenceValidationKnowledge 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.
Quantum MechanicsBehavior Of ParticlesSubatomic WorldUncertaintyPerception Of Reality Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.
UncertaintyEmbracing UncertaintyPursuit Of KnowledgeApproach To LearningCuriosity And Growth I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.
CreativityExpressionBeautyPassionStorytelling 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.
MemoryKnowledgeLearning ProcessMysteryDiscovery 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.
GravitationMysteryUnderstanding Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.
FutureResponsibilityProgressHumanity 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.
IndependenceFreedom From JudgmentSelf-RelianceDeterminationConfidence I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!'
KnowledgeHopeProgressUncertaintyOvercoming Obstacles 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.
CreativityNatureInnovationHuman PotentialLimitlessness See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
HumilityInner StrengthFamily InfluenceSelf-Identity I don't believe in honors - it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.
TruthObservationRealityPhilosophy 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?
ScienceMysteryFaithHumanityMorality 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.
IndividualityInquiryUnderstanding Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.
Artificial IntelligencePrecisionHuman-Computer Interaction Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
RealityIntegrityNatureTechnology For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
KnowledgeLearningTimeGrowth I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
EnergyGravitationUniversalityScientific Principle All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.