“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.” “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” “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.” “Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that"s not why we do it.” “I have a friend who"s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don"t agree with very well. He"ll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I"ll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he"s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it"s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there"s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don"t understand how it subtracts.” “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.” “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” “I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.” “I think it"s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don"t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we"re here. I don"t have to know an answer. I don"t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” “The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.” “I would rather have questions that can"t be answered than answers that can"t be questioned.” “I think it"s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.” “If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.” “A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth"s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe"s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!” “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you"re finished, you"ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let"s look at the bird and see what it"s doing — that"s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” “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.” “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.” “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” “Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.” “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? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. 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?” “There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it"s only a hundred billion. It"s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” “It doesn"t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” “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!” “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.”
