Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! – Richard P. Feynman

My notes from the bestseller book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by the author Richard P. Feynman himself (winner of the Nobel Prize in physics), which I rated  4/5 on my Shelfari account:

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.

I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys–but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

There were lot of fools at the conference – pompous fools – and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is alright. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, “Ooh! It’s just like fucking!

I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out–it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I’d do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.

The whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it–that was interesting to me, like a puzzle.

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