Przemek > Przemek's Quotes

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]”
― Niels Bohr

“What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.”
― Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

“I think we should teach them [the people] wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character

“I noticed that the [drawing] teacher didn't tell people much... Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques - so many mathematical methods - that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy." because *some* artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So,”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand. I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
― 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!”
― Richard Feynman

“Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“She wrote me a letter (Joan,1941) asking,"How can I read it?,Its so hard." I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.”
― Richard Feynman

“Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.”
― Richard Feynman

“They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they knew. 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 P. Feynman

“I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.”
― Richard P. Feynman, 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?': Further Adventures of a Curious Character

“Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. 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. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

“You’re wasting your time,” he said. “You don’t learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life

“I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people.”
― Richard Feynman

“During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“In learning any subject of a technical nature where mathematics plays a role, one is confronted with the task of understanding and storing away in the memory a huge body of facts and ideas, held together by certain relationships which can be “proved” or “shown” to exist between them. It is easy to confuse the proof itself with the relationship which it establishes. Clearly, the important thing to learn and to remember is the relationship, not the proof. In any particular circumstance we can either say “it can be shown that” such and such is true, or we can show it. In almost all cases, the particular proof that is used is concocted, first of all, in such form that it can be written quickly and easily on the chalkboard or on paper, and so that it will be as smooth-looking as possible. Consequently, the proof may look deceptively simple, when in fact, the author might have worked for hours trying different ways of calculating the same thing until he has found the neatest way, so as to be able to show that it can be shown in the shortest amount of time! The thing to be remembered, when seeing a proof, is not the proof itself, but rather that it can be shown that such and such is true. Of course, if the proof involves some mathematical procedures or “tricks” that one has not seen before, attention should be given not to the trick exactly, but to the mathematical idea involved.”
― Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat

“Although my mother didn't know anything about science, she had a great influence on me as well. In particular, she had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest form of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion”
― Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character

“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.”
― Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

“Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.”
― Albert Einstein

“I do not teach anyone I only provide the environment in which they can learn”
― Albert Einstein

“A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”
― Albert Einstein

“Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.”
― Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“It is almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom.”
― Albert Einstein

“Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping. Bill Gates has been a shaper in both business and philanthropy, as was Andrew Carnegie. Mike Bloomberg has been a shaper in business, philanthropy, and government. Einstein, Freud, Darwin, and Newton were giant shapers in the sciences. Christ, Muhammad, and the Buddha were religious shapers. They all had original visions and successfully built them out.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work