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.

Kevin Whately

I'm not interested in more money for the sake of it.

Jonathan Raban

Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

Niklaus Wirth

I have never designed a language for its own sake.

Kenny Smith

Among the multitudes will be found many who cannot discriminate between what is merely wanted and what is needed, what is necessary for bare subsistence and what is indispensable for the sake of the freedom and clarity of one's higher powers.

Pope John Paul II

Freedom exists for the sake of love.

Peter Hammill

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

Pierce Brosnan

I'm Irish, for gods sake. I'm a romantic.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.

Shunryu Suzuki

We do not exist for the sake of something else. We exist for the sake of ourselves.

Sarah McLachlan

Larger than life is your fiction in a universe made up of one.

Rudy Rucker

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Andrew Clements

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

Daniel Woodrell

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

Lexa Doig

I'm more into thrillers than horrors. I also have a thing for period pieces. Science fiction to me is also a period piece. It's an imagined period.

Moon Bloodgood

I love science fiction.

Mike Lee

It is simply science fiction fantasy to say that, if you do not raise the debt ceiling, that everything is going to collapse.

Khaled Hosseini

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.