Richard Feynman
“It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it.”
“People say to me, 'Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?' No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world.”
“If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.”
“The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be.'”
“The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'.”
“Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”
“Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”
“It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.”
“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing.”
“I don't like honors. I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”
“Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science.”
“Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.”
“If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”
“The pleasure of finding things out.”
“What do you care what other people think?”