"SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN!" by Richard P. Feynman

• I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
• But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.
• The problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the “destruction of the moral fiber of society.”
• Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.
• All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t”—which is just another way of saying that you can’t.
• I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it—an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.
• I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.
• All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering.
• The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful.
• What is not really appreciated by most people is that they’re perpetually locking themselves in with locks everywhere, and it’s not very hard to pick them.
• The mathematical constant second in importance to pi is the base of natural logarithms, e: 2.71828…
• It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
• You have to spend a couple of days before something happens, on average.
• When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind.
• I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.
• I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure.
• Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND!
• I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings.
• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.