Richard P. Feynman Quotes

You know what 'DOUBT' stands for? It stands for 'Debate On Understanding Bewildersome Thoughts.'

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

I think it works differently for everyone. Some people do amazing things with research, but for me, it just gets convoluted, and I start to think too much.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

Usually, I'm pretty good about sorting through the options and then making decisions that I'm confident are the best decisions in that moment, given the information we have. But there are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a different level of insight.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

Nothing. I was confused for two years. I didn't understand anything and I'm still confused.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.

I grew up thinking that because I couldn't read, I was stupid and would never amount to anything. I worked my way through college as a waitress and thought I wasn't capable of doing anything else. My grades in English were horrible, and I barely got through.

I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.

Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

In all cases where doubt crops up, ask yourself, "If I had a gun to my head and had to do it, how would I do it?" It's not as hard as you think.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Learn it all, then forget it all.

Every path to a new understanding begins in confusion.

The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

When I get the point, I often don't know what to do with it.

I think one of the great, great problems...is confusing people to the point where they become immobile. In fact, the more things people can find out for themselves, the more vigor the organization is going to have.

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.