Surely Your Joking Mr Feynman by Richard P. Feynman
I don't normally write publish book reviews in my blogs, but I have recently found myself in a autobiography phase stemming from reading "Surely your Joking Mr Feynman" by Richard Feynman and find myself wanting to write down exactly what makes these people so interesting and inspiring for me and undoubtedly so many other people.
This book was an incredible experience that made me read in awe at how one person could possibly do and experience so many things in a their life! His enthusiastic character comes to life through these pages throughout his incredibly inspiring and revealing journey. Here are some quotes that have stuck with me.
- “But if you’ve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease—the delight in being able to see how much you can do.”
- “When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!" "Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.”
- “I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings.”
- “I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.”
- “You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.”
- “Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.”
- “innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world”
- “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”
