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

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Popular quotes

“Because he, more than anyone, knew that sometimes, love wasn’t enough. Sometimes, people changed so deeply that the change broke love itself.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Silver Silence

“At the end of that class Demian said to me thoughtfully: "There’s something I don’t like about this story, Sinclair. Why don’t you read it once more and give it the acid test? There’s something about it that doesn’t taste right. I mean the business with the two thieves. The three crosses standing next to each other on the hill are almost impressive, to be sure. But now comes this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again, it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up with sentimentality and given a high edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which one you’d rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t choose the sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion’, which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to it’s appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendant of Cain. Don’t you agree?"

I was dismayed. Until now I had felt completely at home in the story of the Crucifixion. Now I saw for the first time with how little individuality, with how little power of imagination I had listened to it and read it. Still, Demian’s new concept seemed vaguely sinister and threatened to topple beliefs on whose continued existence I felt I simply had to insist. No, one could not make light of everything, especially not of the most Sacred matters.

As usual he noticed my resistance even before I had said anything.

"I know," he said in a resigned tone of voice, "it’s the same old story: don’t take these stories seriously! But I have to tell you something: this is one of the very places that reveals the poverty of this religion most distinctly. The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental—true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn’t close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Demian

“The caretaker was certainly very ancient, a tight and desiccated thing from which all softness and moisture had long since been extracted.”
― Jonathan Stroud, quote from Die Seufzende Wendeltreppe

“Böyle olağanüstü, dahice bir oyunun ister istemez göreceli ustalar yaratacağı gerçeğini uzun zaman önce anlamıştım; ama dünyayı yalnızca siyah ile beyaz arasındaki dar yola indirgeyen, otuz iki taşı bir oraya bir buraya, bir ileri bir geri oynatarak hayatının zaferini kazanmaya çalışan kıvrak zekalı bir insanın yaşamını kafada canlandırmak ne kadar güç, ne kadar olanaksızdı; bu insanın yeni bir oyuna başlarken piyon yerine atı yeğlemesi olay yaratır ve bir satranç kitabının ufacık bir köşesinde adının geçmesiyle ölümsüzlüğe ulaşmasını sağlar; bu insan, bu akıl insanı, aklını kaçırmadan on, yirmi, otuz, kırk yıl boyunca bütün düşünme gücünü tekrar tekrar aynı gülünç amaca yöneltir: bir tahtanın üzerinde tahta bir şahı köşeye sıkıştırmak!

Sayfa :23”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Schachnovelle

“There you are," Cardan says as I take my place beside him. "How has the night been going for you? Mine has been full of dull conversation about how my head is going to find itself on a spike.”
― Holly Black, quote from The Cruel Prince

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