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05261dd
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I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
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physics
science
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Richard P. Feynman |
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3586792
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Soon it began to drizzle for the second time that night. The drops grew heavier and became visible in the headlights of the cars. It was said by some of the police on the scene that God was crying for the girl in the garden. To others, it was only rain.
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George P. Pelecanos |
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89a7d5a
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The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."
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Richard P. Feynman |
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eeed702
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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.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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911c79a
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When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, "Ooh! It's just like fucking!"
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Richard P. Feynman |
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0dae71d
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A man does not learn very well, Mr. Robbins. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man, if you will pardon me, stops learning at fourteen or so. He shuts it all down, Mr. Robbins. A log is capable of learning more than a man. To teach a man would be a battle, a war, and I would lose.
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Edward P. Jones |
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3b75c00
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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. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. ..
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Richard P. Feynman |
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596d643
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Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.
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Edward P. Jones |
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f183d75
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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P. D. James |
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064620a
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In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right...
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Richard P. Feynman |
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239ed26
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In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and obje..
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H. P. Lovecraft |
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8b6f46f
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I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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5beb117
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How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars--mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagina-tion--s..
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Richard P. Feynman |
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a002618
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I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe t..
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Richard P. Feynman |
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3c96dc9
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I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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4b55261
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Lord Marshmoreton: I wish I could get you see my point of view. George Bevan: I do see your point of view. But dimly. You see, my own takes up such a lot of the foreground
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P G Wodehouse |
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fa60bfd
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Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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0175399
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Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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b8fd645
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the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
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man
nature
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Richard P. Feynman |
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1dfea06
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The things that mattered were honesty, independence, willingness to admit ignorance.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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137f5bc
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Ho visto oscuri universi spalancarsi Dove neri pianeti ruotano senza meta...
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H. P. Lovecraft |
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ce6ee3d
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Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.
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Edward P. Jones |
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c82ad86
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Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. |
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92962a5
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As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing cease to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. ...A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. |
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b100b8e
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That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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de9401c
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the whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it-that was interesting to me, like a puzzle
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Richard P. Feynman |
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e9080da
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I wouldn't stop until I figured the damn thing out-it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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73a4d85
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We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty--some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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7ff690a
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I think we should teach them [the people] wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more.
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physicscs
science
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Richard P. Feynman |
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d04195d
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I've always been rather very one-sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I didn't have much patience for what's called the humanities; even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work on it. It's only afterwards, when I've gotten older and more relaxed that I've spread o..
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Richard P. Feynman |
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16ed99a
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Musical comedy is the Irish stew of drama. Anything may be put into it, with the certainty that it will improve the general effect.
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P. G. Wodehouse |
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31f0075
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I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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90a2eb2
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if we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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84d9f49
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How much do you value life?" "Sixty-four."
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Richard P. Feynman |
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5af6e3e
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Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make a..
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scientific-method
theory
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Richard P. Feynman |
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d422087
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There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal p..
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Richard P. Feynman |
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4438104
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Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don't know what's true, we're trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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c99c3ff
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I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. 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.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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a15c086
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So our problem is to explain where symmetry comes from. Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, a gate in Neiko, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan; it was built in a time when there was great influence from Chinese art. This gate is very elaborate, with lots of gables and beautiful carving and ..
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Richard P. Feynman |
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c434280
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Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. |
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07b4a70
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Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.
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learning
self-awareness
specialization
thought-provoking
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Richard P. Feynman |
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41c584c
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There were a lot of fools at that conference--pompous fools--and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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db9d6c6
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Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about.
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Richard P. Feynman |
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6de52a8
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psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring.
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Richard P. Feynman |