Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

They said, “Well, for instance, is electricity fire?”
“No,” I said, “but . . . what is the problem?”
They said, “In the Talmud it says you’re not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?”

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools

It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe

So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.

My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.

“How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?”
“Well, I flew to San Francisco, so it’s the airfare, plus the parking at the airport while I was away.”
“Do you have your ticket?”
I happened to have the ticket.
“Do you have a receipt for the parking?”
“No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car.”
“But we have to have a receipt.”
“I told you how much it cost. If you don’t trust me, why do you let me tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?”

There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson On Freedom

Yes, it’s very closely related. In theoretical physics, the analog of the word is the mathematical formula, the analog of the structure of the poem is the interrelationship of the theoretical bling-bling with the so-and so

I hope these won’t be the only memoirs of Richard Feynman. Certainly the reminiscences here give a true picture of much of his character–his al