Quotes from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“– and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.
She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?"
"In physics," I said.
"Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it."
"On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"
I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“You have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“That’s the trouble with not being in your own field: You don’t take it seriously.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“How much do you value life?” “Sixty-four.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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 an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

About the author

Popular quotes

“Sometimes the ones you trust aren't the most trustworthy. Just better actors.”
― Veronica Blade, quote from Something Witchy This Way Comes

“It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”
― Stephen Hawking, quote from The Grand Design

“Whoever said it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved was full of crap.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from My Soul to Steal

“Ranger is one of the few civilians in Trenton with a permit to carry concealed. He owns office buildings in Boston, has a daughter in Florida by a failed marriage, has worked worldwide as a mercenary, and has a moral code that isn’t entirely in sync with our legal system. I have no idea who the heck he is . . . but I like him.”
― Janet Evanovich, quote from Seven Up

“Sometimes we need to fight for peace,”
― Veronica Roth, quote from Divergent Series Complete Box Set

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.