A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about
atoms.

A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right...

If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised.

Physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. Physics doesn’t take something fascinating and make it boring. Rather, it helps us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world around us. When I bike to work in the fall, I see beauty in the trees tinged with red, orange and gold. But seeing these trees through the lens of physics reveals even more beauty.

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world — outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes — has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate.

I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world

Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms — but this doesn’t negate the truth or utility of physics.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe

...[P]hysics... [is] the philosophy of nature, so far as it is based on empirical laws.