Quotes from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. —Richard Feynman”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist’s swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The military actively encouraged, when it did not finance directly, the giant cyclotrons, betatrons, synchrotrons, and synchrocyclotrons, any one of which consumed more steel and electricity than a prewar experimentalist could have imagined. These were not so much crumbs from the weapons-development table as they were blank checks from officials persuaded that physics worked miracles. Who could say what was impossible? Free energy? Time travel? Antigravity? In 1954 the secretary of the army invited Feynman to serve as a paid consultant on an army scientific advisory panel, and he agreed, traveling to Washington for several days in November. At a cocktail party after one session, a general confided that what the army really needed was a tank that could use sand as fuel.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“They could see from the start that Wilson’s idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless—but on which side of the border?”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: “What makes it move?” The proposed answer—“Energy makes it move”—enraged him. That”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures?”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers “are always on the outside making stupid remarks,” he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these—not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach—is our now.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation.” Forces”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts.”
― James Gleick, quote from Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

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“I have been in many dugouts, Ludwig,” he goes on. “And we were all young men who sat there around one miserable slush lamp, waiting, while the barrage raged overhead like an earthquake. We were none of your inexperienced recruits, either; we knew well enough what we were waiting for and we knew what would come. —But there was more in those faces down in the gloom there than mere calm, more than good humour, more than just readiness to die. There was the will to another future in those hard, set faces; and it was there when they charged, and still there when they died. —We had less to say for ourselves year by year, we shed many things, but that one thing still remained. And now, Ludwig, where is it now? Can’t you see how it is perishing in all this pig’s wash of order, duty, women, routine, punctuality and the rest of it that here they call life? —No, Ludwig, we lived then! And you tell me a thousand times that you hate war, yet I still say, we lived then. We lived, because we were together, and because something burned in us that was more than this whole muck heap here!” He is breathing hard. “It must have been for something, Ludwig! When I first heard there was revolution, for one brief moment I thought: Now the time will be redeemed—now the flood will pour back, tearing down the old things, digging new banks for itself—and, by God, I would have been in it! But the flood broke up into a thousand runnels; the revolution became a mere scramble for jobs, for big jobs and little jobs. It has trickled away, it has been dammed up, it has been drained off into business, into family, and party. —But that will not do me. I’m going where comradeship is still to be found.” Ludwig stands up. His brow is flaming, his eyes blaze. He looks Rahe in the face. “And why is it, Georg? Why is it? Because we were duped, I tell you, duped as even yet we hardly realize; because we were misused, hideously misused. They told us it was for the Fatherland, and meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry. —They told us it was for Honour, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes. —They told us it was for the Nation, and meant the need for activity on the part of out-of-work generals!” He takes Rahe by the shoulders and shakes him. “Can’t you see? They stuffed out the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism, their stupidity, their greed of business, and then paraded it before us as a shining ideal! And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can’t you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without knowing it! Every shot that struck home, struck one of us! Can’t you see? Then listen and I will bawl it into your ears. The youth of the world rose up in every land, believing that it was fighting for freedom! And in every land they were duped and misused; in every land they have been shot down, they have exterminated each other! Don’t you see now? —There is only one fight, the fight against the lie, the half-truth, compromise, against the old order. But we let ourselves be taken in by their phrases; and instead of fighting against them, we fought for them. We thought it was for the Future. It was against the Future. Our future is dead; for the youth is dead that carried it. We are merely the survivors, the ruins. But the other is alive still—the fat, the full, the well content, that lives on, fatter and fuller, more contented than ever! And why? Because the dissatisfied, the eager, the storm troops have died for it. But think of it! A generation annihilated! A generation of hope, of faith, of will, strength, ability, so hypnotised that they have shot down one another, though over the whole world they all had the same purpose!” His”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Road Back

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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