Youth

I didn't get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me out all the time, to play.

– Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 17

When I was a kid, I had this notion that you could take the importance of the problem and multiply it by your chance of solving it. You know how a technically minded kid is, he likes the idea of optimizing everything anyway, if you can get the right combination of those factors, you don't spend your life getting nowhere with a profound problem, or solving lots of small problems that others could do just as well.

– Omni interview, February 1979

Don't despair of standard dull textbooks. Just close the book once in a while and think what they just said in your own terms as a revelation of the spirit and wonder of nature. The books give you facts but your imagination can supply life. My father taught me how to do that when I was a little boy on his knee, and he read the Encyclopaedia Britannica to me!

– Letter to Rodney C. Lewis, August 1981 (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, pp. 332–333)

I went to take the calculus book out, and the teacher — sorry, the librarian — said, "Child, you can't take this book out. Why are you taking this book out?" I said, "It's for my father." And so I took it home, and I tried to learn a little bit. My father looked at the first few paragraphs and couldn't understand it, and this was rather a shock to me — a little bit of a shock, I remember. It was the first time I realized that I could understand what he couldn't understand.

– Interview with Charles Weiner, March 4, 1966 (Niels Bohr Library and Archives with the Center for the History of Physics)

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

– What Do You Care What Other People Think?, p. 14

When I was a child and found out Santa Claus wasn't real, I wasn't upset. Rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night.

– Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1994

When I was young, what I call the laboratory was just a place to fiddle around, make radios and gadgets and photocells and whatnot. I was very shocked when I discovered what they call a laboratory in a university. That's a place where you are supposed to measure something very seriously. I never measured a damn thing in my laboratory.

– Future for Science interview

[On his first talk:] I remember getting up to talk, and there were these great men in the audience and it was frightening. And I can still see my own hands as I pulled out the papers from the envelope that I had them in. They were shaking. As soon as I got the paper out and started to talk, something happened to me which has always happened since and which is a wonderful thing. If I'm talking physics, I love the thing. I think only about physics, I don't worry where I am; I don't worry about anything, and everything went very easily.

– Future for Science interview

The moment I realized that I was now working on something new was when I read something about quantum electrodynamics at the time, and I read a book, and I learned about it. For example, I read Dirac's book, and they had these problems that nobody knew how to solve. I couldn't understand the book very well because I wasn't up to it, but at the last paragraph at the very end of the book, it said, "Some new ideas are here needed!" And so there I was! Some new ideas were there needed, so I started to think of new ideas.

– Interview with Yorkshire Television program, "Take the World from Another Point of View," 1972

[To one of his former high school teachers:] Another thing that I remember as being very important to me was the time when you called me down after class and said, "You make too much noise in class." Then you went on to say that you understood the reason, that it was that the class was entirely too boring. Then you pulled out a book from behind you and said, "Here, you read this, take it up to the back of the room, sit all along, and study this; when you know everything that is in it, you can talk again." And so, in my physics class I paid no attention to what was going on but only studied Woods' Advanced Calculus up in the back of the room. It was there that I learned about gamma functions, elliptic functions, and differentiating under an integral sign. A trick at which I became an expert.

– Letter to Abram Bader, November 1965 (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, pp. 176–177)

[CBS] asked me what I thought of the New York School System, and I said that I am only good in physics and I do not know the New York School System except for the particular school that I went to thirty years ago. I thought that my high school was very good. There was a great variety of science courses offered for those times — advanced math, physics, chemistry, and biology. Several teachers gave me direct encouragement, good advice, and taught me special things outside the regular courses. I had a good time in high school.

– Letter to Miriam Cohen, November 1965

[To his aunt:] It is good to hear from someone who has known me for so long. You have gone through all the stages with mother, from ruined linen towels to mom's worrying about whether I would blow up the house with my laboratory.

– Letter to Jesse M. Davidson, December 1965 (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, p. 181)

[On his father:] He was rational; he liked the rational mind and things that could be understood by thinking.

– Interview with Charles Weiner, March 4, 1966 (Niels Bohr Library and Archives with the Center for the History of Physics)

When I got to kindergarten, which was much later — I was six years old — they had a thing in those days which was "weaving." They had a kind of colored paper — square paper with quarter-inch slots made parallel. And you have quarter-inch strips of paper. One was the weft and the other was the warp. You're supposed to weave it and make designs that were regular and interesting. And apparently that's extremely difficult...