Princess Donut > Princess Donut's Quotes

“Be not simply good; be good for something.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

“And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.” “How”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!

“And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Light and Darkness. One cannot exist without the other. There is no true Master, without the power of balance. ☥”
― Luis Marques, Kemet - The Year of Revelation

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
― Richard Feynman

“Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb.”
― Richard Feynman

“A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”
― Richard P. Feynman

“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.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”
― Richard Feynman

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

And so it is with science.”
― Richard Feynman

“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain way--in such a way that often nobody believes me!”
― Richard Feynman

“The first person you should be careful not to fool is yourself. Because you are the easiest person to fool".”
― Richard Feynman

“I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.”
― Richard Feynman

“Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”
― Richard Feynman

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman