You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.
Interpretation
Embracing uncertainty allows for a more flexible understanding of knowledge and beliefs.
In this quote, Richard P. Feynman expresses the idea that living with doubt and uncertainty is acceptable and even beneficial. He suggests that having varying degrees of confidence in our beliefs can enrich our understanding of the world, rather than hinder it. By acknowledging that not everything can be known with absolute certainty, one can approach life with a more open and inquisitive mindset, finding comfort in ambiguity.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a discussion about scientific inquiry and the nature of knowledge.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.
Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places.
Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.
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