Richard P. Feynman Quotes

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.

One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.

My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space/time point.

Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations.

The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.

Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.

Science's domain is the natural. If you want to understand the natural world and be sure you're not misleading yourself, science is the way to do it.

The scientist's inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations.

In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power: we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass.

All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.

The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word.

One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.

We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.

That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life than an infant just born.

I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature's laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.

But nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.