There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

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.

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

What one fool can understand, another can.

Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

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!

I don't believe in honors - it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.

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.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party.

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.

With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw - isn't that wonderful - so I made up a false name.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

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?