Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes are memorable and emphatic!
His teaching methods and philosophies have made a gross impact in the arena of science and nature.
- You should not miss this – Richard Feynman IQ & 10 Lessons From Richard Feynman’s Life
He was an American theoretical physicist. In 1965, Richard Feynman also received a Nobel Prize in Physics for his massive contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics.
Below are some of his teaching quotes. Read and Enjoy!
Table of Contents
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
Richard Feynman Education Quotes
1- “I don’t believe I can really do without teaching.”
2- “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.”
3- “What did you ASK at school today?”
4- “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
5- “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
6- “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?”
7- “So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”
8- “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
9- “I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere, I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something. I’m making some contribution.” It’s just psychological.”
10- “I DON’T believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution”–it’s just psychological.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
11- “Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”
12- “Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.”
13- “If you can’t explain something to a first-year student, then you haven’t really understood.”
14- “I think, however, that there isn’t any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher – a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It’s impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal.”
15- “If you want to master something, teach it.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
16- “First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.”
17- “We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.”
18- “What one fool can understand, another can.”
19- “Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!”
20- “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
21- “The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another.”
22- “The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction – a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory – who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unusual point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself.”
23- “But See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
24- “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”
25- “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
26- “I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there.”
27- “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
28- “I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”
29- “Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter.”
30- “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!”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
31- “When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.”
32- “There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.”
33- “Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.”
34- “My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.”
35- “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
36- “If you can’t explain something to a first-year student, then you haven’t really understood.”
37- “Study hard what interests you most, in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.”
38- “The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.”
39- “In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself.”
40- “I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
41- “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
42- “In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
43- “Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”
44- “If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.”
45- “I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.”
Richard Feynman Education Quotes
46- “It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.”
47- “You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.”
48- “If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.”
49- “There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.”
50- “The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.”
Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes
51- “In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another.”
Conclusion
We hope you have enjoyed Richard Feynman Teaching Quotes so far and must have learned something by now!
We would love to know your favorite quote by Richard Feynman.
Do share this piece with your family and friends to instill scientific vigor and curiosity within them.
Also, we are open to your valuable suggestions to up our work.
Spread the word and help the world.
Thank You!