A Quote by Richard P. Feynman

Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!"
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns' by Robert Jungk and 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!' by Richard Feynman were both books my father purchased for me when I was in high school. Both left a lasting impression on me, because they chronicle the lives of some of the most creative scientists of the 21st century.
When I entered graduate school I had carried out the instructions given to me by my father and had knocked on both Murray Gell-Mann's and Feynman's doors and asked them what they were currently doing. Murray wrote down the partition function for the three-dimensional Ising model and said it would be nice if I could solve it (at least that is how I remember the conversation). Feynman's answer was 'nothing'.
Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.
I once dated someone who worked at McDonald's. She came up and asked if I wanted a Big Mac.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.
Kero and Rollo stood over it, slick with blood, both holding knives. ‘Kero, you came? Why?’ asked Naif. ‘Maybe I just needed someone to show me how to be brave enough,’ he replied with a hint of a dangerous grin.
A man once asked me, what's punk? I kicked over a trash can and said that's punk. He kicked over a trash can and then asked me again, Is that punk? I replied no. That's just trendy.
Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son! Why don't you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here? asked Confucius. And the woman replied, But sir, there are no tax collectors here! Confucius added to his disciples, You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers.
Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.
Why not go down the pub? A guy once came up to me at a gig and asked me if I had MySpace. I said, 'This is my space, and you're invading it.'
A woman at the Limited once asked me, 'Why do you work?' She said, 'You made a lot of money as a young man, so why are you still working?' I had never thought about it before. Forced to consider it, I told her, 'You know why? Because I think that if you stop to smell the roses, you'll get hit by a truck.
A woman at the Limited once asked me, 'Why do you work?' She said, 'You made a lot of money as a young man, so why are you still working?' I had never thought about it before. Forced to consider it, I told her, 'You know why? Because I think that if you stop to smell the roses, you'll get hit by a truck.'
Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.
Someone once asked me, `How does Jimmy Page strike you?' I replied, `With both hands, of course...'
I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, "Aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?" Tracy replied, "What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?" You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.
The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'
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