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.

Evan Bayh

I think I should hear what the man has to say before making up my mind, ... Whoever is chosen for this spot could be on our nation's highest court for 30 years perhaps, and deal with some of the most fundamental liberties that we have in this country. So I think it's important we take our time, ask the right questions, listen carefully to the answers and then reach a considered judgment.

Paul Heath

It answers who did it and possibly why they did it, and to that extent, there is closure.

Robert Vaughn

The world's philosophers and theologians searched for answers to the same mysteries.

Robert Reich

Education is not the only answer and it's certainly not the immediate solution. At best, it's a necessary, but not sufficient response to widening inequality.

Will Thomas

Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves.

Warren Buffett

Unless your answers are clearly better, copy the answers of your betters.

W. H. Auden

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

Robert M. Pirsig

every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.

Joseph Addison

Jesters do often prove prophets.

George Andrew Olah

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.

James Russell Lowell

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

John Cheever

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

Northrop Frye

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

Northrop Frye

Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

Northrop Frye

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

Norman Maclean

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.