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.

William McDonough

The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious - as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree.

Willa Cather

Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.

W. S. Merwin

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

Zac Hanson

Lots and lots of trees together, equals big trees!

Tyra Banks

Once you plant seeds of success, your tree will bear fierce fruit.

Washington Irving

The moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl.

William Boyd

Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

Walter Savage Landor

Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.

Rick Riordan

I thought maybe he was seeing another tree. - Juniper

Jackie Cooper

Keep 'em clear of things like leaves and tree branches and stuff. They run hot.

Sadie Jones

We feel the pull of nature very strongly, relating - even unknowingly - feeling in ourselves to bulbs being stirred in frozen ground, or to the branches of dead trees. Perhaps this indivisibility from nature is an important thing to recognize as we go about our business in the world.

Tom Kelly

Every time there is a robbery at one of our branches we try to figure out what happened and why the numbers go up ... most of us are left scratching our heads.

Alexander Hamilton

The superiority...enjoyed by nations that have...perfected a branch of industry, constitutes a...formidable obstacle.

Alexander Hamilton

. . . [The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.

Stanislaw Lem

I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.

Henry Mayhew

But the branches of industry are so multifarious, the divisions of labour so minutes and manifold, that it seems at first almost impossible to reduce them to any system

Mike Gravel

Our three branches of government have become like an unstable chair, a three-legged chair. The founders could not have envisioned how much money and special interests would corrupt the political process. Giving us Americans legislative power will put forth the fourth leg of our stool and make it stable.