You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

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.

That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.

I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.