Richard P. Feynman Quotes

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen! If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.

I don't believe in astrology. It's a lot of crap. I just think that's another thing you should throw out the window. Mysticism. Cheap. It's amazing that people still hang on to that after all these years.

Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity.

The difference between science and religion is that the former wishes to get rid of mysteries whereas the latter worships them.

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.

Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

Without science, everything is a miracle.

In some ways we live in a world where things appear to be very logical, very rational, and mechanical aspects of our world are rather scientific and rather straightforward.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

Faith just doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing as a scientist. It's nice if you can believe in God, because then you see more of a purpose in things. Even if you don't, though, it doesn't mean that there's no purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no goodness. I think that there's a virtue in being good in and of itself. I think that one can work with the world we have.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.

There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.

On any occasion when one can discover the cause of events, one should not resort to the gods.

Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

In our advanced technological age, most people deny the possibility of miracles.... Miracles don't happen, we are told, because they contravene the laws of nature and worse, they sound religious! Yet we live and move in a sea of miracle.

Practically, Science is true; and Faith is foolish.