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

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. ... If you will simply admit that maybe [Nature] does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Richard P. Feynman

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

Richard Dawkins

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Richard Whately

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

John Charles Polanyi

Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

Alan Alda

I must have interviewed 600 or 700 scientists all around the world.

Ben Okri

I was going to be a scientist.

Arthur Koestler

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Thomas R. Cech

I think there is value in having practising scientists as leaders of research institutions.

Tim Berners-Lee

Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

Harrison Ford

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Alan Alda

I think it's important for scientists to speak in their own voices and not just be mediated by journalists or others speaking for them.

Fabiola Gianotti

We will have to be very vigilant that young female scientists have the same opportunities as their male colleagues.

Kevin Youkilis

I guess I'm in a trivial pursuit question. It's really weird.

Richard Peterson

Whether they're successful in that pursuit remains to be seen,

Albert Einstein

The pursuit of knowledge is more valuable than its possession.

Thomas Jefferson

If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness.

Martin Seligman

The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a right of all Americans, as well as on the self-improvement shelves of every American bookstore. Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness just as we do for weight. And just as dieters almost always regain the weight they lose, sad people don't become lastingly happy, and happy people don't become lastingly sad.

Peter Drucker

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

Mark Twain

It is an important thing, in our never-ending pursuit of happiness, to stop and just be happy for a while.

Mason Cooley

Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute.

Lulu

The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.