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.

Plato

The good man is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

Jane Fonda

I was a chameleon, the woman men wanted me to be.

Raquel Cassidy

I went to see 'Men In Black 2.' It was just a commodity, just money being shifted.

William Wilberforce

Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, and then go straight forward.

William Wilberforce

Sulky labor, and the labor of sorrow are little worth: if you could only shed tranquility over the conscience and infuse joy into the soul, you would do more to make the man a thorough worker than if you could lend him the force of Hercules, or the hundred arms of Briareus.

Abbott L. Lowell

There's a Harvard man on the wrong side of every question.

Abbott L. Lowell

All social life, stability, progress, depend upon each man's confidence in his neighbor, a reliance upon him to do his duty.

Antoni Gaudi

The straight line belongs to Man. The curved line belongs to God

Lord Shaftesbury

Temper, if ungoverned, governs the whole man.

Roger Ascham

Marke all Mathematicall heades, which be onely and wholy bent to those sciences, how solitarie they be themselues, how vnfit to liue with others, & how vnapte to serue in the world.

Art Buchwald

The buffalo isn't as dangerous as everyone makes him out to be. Statistics prove that in the United States more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than are killed by buffalo.

Douglas Adams

The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.

Albert Einstein

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

Ronald Fisher

If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.

Maurice Chevalier

Considering the alternative. . . it's not too bad at all.

John Ralston Saul

I have a theory of statistics: if you can double them or halve them and they still work, they are really good statistics.

Michael Crichton

Theories are just fantasies. And they change.

Hippocrates

And he will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.