Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
Interpretation
Pursue your passions with intensity and creativity, without strict adherence to conventional methods.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman emphasizes the importance of studying what you are truly passionate about. It encourages individuals to approach learning with a spirit of curiosity and originality, suggesting that the most effective way to learn is through a personal and sometimes unconventional exploration of one's interests.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a commencement speech to inspire graduates to pursue their interests.
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.
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.
Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.
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