The Pleasure of Finding Things Out Quotes

“I’ve learned how to live without knowing. I don’t have to be sure I’m succeeding, and as I said before about science, I think my life is fuller because I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m delighted with the width of the world!”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will be fully appreciated that the power of government should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that that is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the various descriptions of history or of economic theory or of philosophy. Only in this way can the real possibilities of the future human race be ultimately developed.”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified–how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right so long as it doesn’t attack religion, was the clue that I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn’t attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from modern society except for its applications, and thus be isolated”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“As long as it’s possible, we should disregard authority whenever the observations disagree with it”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“it is a part of the adventure of science to try to find a limitation in all directions and to stretch the human imagination as far as possible everywhere. Although at every stage it has looked as if such an activity was absurd and useless, it often turns out at least not to be useless”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms–or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything.”
― Richard P Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“You see? That’s why scientists persist in their investigations, why we struggle so desperately for every bit of knowledge, stay up nights seeking the answer to a problem, climb the steepest obstacles to the next fragment of understanding, to finally reach that joyous moment of the kick in the discovery, which is part of the pleasure of finding things out.”
― Richard P Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“How does science show it–how did the scientists find out–how, what, where?”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the race experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“Clearly, peace is a great force, as is sobriety, as are material power, communication, education, honesty, and the ideals of many dreamers.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“lots of kids get the spirit–and when they have the spirit you have a scientist. It’s too late for them to get the spirit when they are in our universities, so we must attempt to explain these ideas to children.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and “looks” around. (Of course the information has to be fed out.) It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs)* suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and “looks” around. (Of course the information has to be fed out.) It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“the way I think of what we’re doing is we’re exploring, we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we’re going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“you were talking about physics and if that’s what you’re talking about, then to not know mathematics is a severe limitation in understanding the world.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“If we look away from the science and look at the world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: that the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“Our freedom to doubt was born of a struggle against authority in the early days of science.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“Buddhist religion: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“Mathematics is looking for patterns.”
― Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out