I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

I’m a good teacher and am great at observation and picking out what’s wrong and fixing it.

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!

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

At home, we must reject the mistaken notion – a notion that has dominated too much of the public dialogue for too long – that ever bigger Government is the answer to every problem.

When grand plans for scientific and defence technologies are made, do the people in power think about the sacrifices the people in the laboratories and fields have to make?

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

If two smart, intelligent, clever guys sit together on a table, and you both want the same, where can be the problem? We all want to be successful.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

The same thing is to be understood of all bodies, revolved in any orbits. They all endeavour to recede from the centres of their orbits, and were it not for the opposition of a contrary force which restrains them to and detains them in their orbits, which I therefore call Centripetal, would fly off in right lines with a uniform motion.

I need physics more than friends.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling, you can show the relationship.

An object in motion tends to remain in motion along a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force.

Don’t find fault, find a remedy.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

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.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves – who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

Solutions are not the answer.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

There were several possible solutions of the difficulty of classical electrodynamics, any one of which might serve as a good starting point to the solution of the difficulties of quantum electrodynamics.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

Just as the system of the sun, planets and comets is put in motion by the forces of gravity, and its parts persist in their motions, so the smaller systems of bodies also seem to be set in motion by other forces and their particles to be variously moved in relation to each other and, especially, by the electric force.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

OK, so what’s the speed of dark?

It’s just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we’re in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries – and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Working out another system to replace Newton’s laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one’s common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone – both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.