Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

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.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Richard P. Feynman

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard P. Feynman

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

Woody Allen

Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.

Norman O. Brown

The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.

Marcus Aurelius

Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet .

Nell Minow

They got the words right and the substance wrong, ... I'm very disappointed.

Diane Wakoski

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

Edith Wharton

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Barry Commoner

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

George Berkeley

I do not deny the existence of material substance merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.

Jacques Barzun

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

Edward Hirsch

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

Salman Rushdie

The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.

Robert M. Pirsig

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Robin McKinley

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

W. Somerset Maugham

The end of culture is right living

Renée Arrington

If you find that you have several disengaged workers, that might be symptomatic of your culture.

Beppe Severgnini

If you are the owner of a factory employing 500 people, on Monday you talk to any of them about soccer, and that's completely unifying. Italy doesn't have very much in terms of national culture like that. ... You have Hollywood and all the stars, we don't have anything remotely (like that). Soccer compensates.

Stephen Harper

Can the prime minister tell us why this Liberal culture of waste and scandal is only stopped once it is actually exposed publicly?

Reese Witherspoon

I'm having a great time playing Becky, ... She's a world away from Elle Woods and for me it's a great departure. It was a natural decision for me to get as far away from American pop culture as I could.