Richard P. Feynman Quotes

We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things.

Only the fools are certain and assured.

What I learned is that it's arrogant to be certain of anything. The world is a complex place and only idiots or assholes think they know it all.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.

Knowledge is the barrier to knowing. When knowledge is dropped, knowing flowers.

Knowing ignorance is strength; ignoring knowledge is sickness.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

Knowing that we don't know it's humility; thinking that we know what we don't know, is sickness.

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

Another error is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients; the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation; if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

The best advice I've ever received is, 'No one else knows what they're doing either.

A scientist is never certain. ... We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning.

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

So as grave and learned men may doubt, without any imputation to them; for the most learned doubteth most, and the more ignorant for the most part are the more bold and peremptory.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

Guessing a thing ain't knowing a thing.

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know, -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

many things I knew, I have forgotten; many things I thought I knew, I find I know nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth knowing; and some things I would give - O what would one not give to know? are beyond the reach of human ken.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.