Quotes

Albert Einstein

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." -Albert Einstein

This is a quote by Albert Einstein that appears in an interview for the Saturday Evening Post (1929). The quote is a response to a question posed by the interviewer, George Sylvester Viereck, where he queried Einstein: "Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?" Einstein's answer to this question includes one additional sentence that precedes the portion of the quote that I have reproduced; that sentence reads, "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."

Richard Feynman

"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." -Richard Feynman*

Unlike the quote above for Einstein, for which the genesis can be tracked and referenced, this quote "by Feynman" seems to be misattributed or entirely fabricated. Feynman has many beautiful quotes about physics, science, philosophy, and life, and an attribute of his remarkable "quotableness" is how his quotes often spoke simultaneously to a lay audience and a scientific audience. I am no Feynman scholar, but it is probably no surprise that his ability to communicate sophisticated information in a form easily digestible by the public is what makes him one of only a handful of modern physicists to have name recognition within the general population (i.e., non-physicists or even non-scientists). As such, doesn't this quote sound like it could be from Feynman? I include it here not for the accuracy of its attribution, but for the actual quote itself. Frankly, whoever coined this or said this constructed a phrase that unabashedly touches on one of the reasons, in my humble opinion, that physicists practice physics.