Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.
Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
Physics isn’t the most important thing. Love is.
I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb.
Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.
An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!
Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.
If you have any talent, or any occupation that delights you, do it, and do it to the hilt. Don’t ask why, or what difficulties you may get into.
Work hard to find something that fascinates you.
What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?
Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?
One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.
There’s plenty of room at the bottom.
By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.
All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.
The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don’t know one or two rules.
If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.
When a Caltech student asked the eminent cosmologist Michael Turner what his “bias” was in favoring one or another particle as a likely candidate to compromise dark matter in the universe, Feynmann snapped, “Why do you want to know his bias? Form your own bias!”
Precise language is not the problem. Clear language is the problem.