642 Quotes by Richard P. Feynman

Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

The exception tests the rule.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface.

My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.

Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

I’m not responsible for what other people think I am able to do; I don’t have to be good because they think I’m going to be good.

I am not interested in what today’s mathematicians find interesting.

There’s plenty of room at the bottom.