When I read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, I recalled that 42 years ago I started out majoring in physics, switching because I was too immature to understand that I had to have the ... understanding ... before I could get to the "good stuff". David S. Wood, in an interview with Shirley K. Cohen in May of 1994 had this to say

And these new areas; when I was an undergraduate, nobody did quantum mechanics, except super-advanced PhD students. First they had to learn all sorts of fancy Hamiltonian mechanics and all sorts of stuff, it was thought then. You had to go through all that monkey business before you could hope to even begin quantum mechanics . . . . Richard Feynman, among other people, showed that you don’t have to go through that other stuff. You just start talking about quantum mechanics and the kids lap it up.

I had a very good teacher in Dr. V. V. Raman, but if Feynman had been my teacher I think things would have turned out quite differently. No matter. I am far more curious now about everything than I ever dreamed of being back then.

Quotes and notes curated by his daughter, there is a lot of good stuff here. The curation tells its own story as will my selected highlights. From a book of quotes, best get to noting what I found notable during the read, with the section headings chosen by Michelle (any comments of mine in italics following):

Youth
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
– What Do You Care What Other People Think?, p. 14

Family
[On his son:] He’s a lot like me, so at least I’ve passed on this idea that everything is interesting to at least one other person. Of course, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, you see?
– Omni interview, February 1979
I like the precision of "to at least one other person"...

Autobiographical
[On philosophers:] It isn’t the philosophy that gets me, it’s the pomposity. If they’d just laugh at themselves!
– Omni interview, February 1979 (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p. 195)
Love it!

Perhaps it is just that I enjoy being peculiar.
– Letter to Dr. Detlev W. Bronk and the National Academy of Sciences, August 1961 (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, p. 108)
Perhaps I do as well

You ask me on what I think about life, etc., as if I had some wisdom. Maybe, by accident, I do — of course I don’t know — all I know is I have opinions.
– Letter to Mr. V. A. Van Der Hyde, July 1986 (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, p. 413)

It turned out that the notes I took at conferences were never very useful for anything, and I don’t take much notes at conferences any more.
- Interview with Charles Weiner, February 4, 1966 (Niels Bohr Library and Archives with the Center for the History of Physics)
This! I discovered that years ago when I tried looking at some of my notes from conferences. Not very useful.

Nature
[On the laws of gravitation:] The only applications of the knowledge of the law that I can think of are in geophysical prospecting, in predicting the tides, and nowadays,
more modernly, in working out the motions of the satellites and planet probes that we send up, and so on; and finally, also modernly, to calculate the predictions of the planets’ positions, which have great utility for astrologists who publish their predictions in horoscopes in the magazines. It is a strange world we live in — that all the new advances in understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for 2,000 years.
– The Character of Physical Law, p. 27
Oh, snap.

Nature of Science
Physics is not mathematics, and mathematics is not physics. One helps the other. But in physics you have to have an understanding of the connection of words with the
real world. It is necessary at the end to translate what you have figured out into English, into the world, into the blocks of copper and glass that you are going to do the experiments with. Only in that way can you find out whether the consequences are true.
– The Character of Physical Law, p. 55

Science is only useful if it tells you about some experiment that has not been done; it is no good if it only tells you what just went on.
– The Character of Physical Law, p. 164

Curiosity and Discovery
The way I think of what we’re doing is, we’re exploring — we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not. I’m just looking to find out more about the world. If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion, with millions of layers, and we’re sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that’s the way it is. But whatever it comes out, it’s nature, and she’s going to come out the way she is! Therefore when we go investigate it we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re going to find, except to find out more.
– BBC, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” 1981
"we shouldn’t predecide"...so simple, and yet so missing sometimes

How Physicists Think
The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only
necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.
– “New Textbooks for the ‘New’ Mathematics,” Engineering and Science 28, no. 6 (March 1965)

Science and Society
Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course. If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other. If you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can’t all be there. It’s too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time.
– “The Unscientific Age,” John Danz Lecture Series, 1963

I believe that the science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einstein’s theory to people who don’t understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith-healing or on astrology on what is the scientific view of astrology today.
– Galileo Symposium, “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” September 1964
Until science eventually took it on itself, but it didn’t matter.

Mathematics
To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. C. P. Snow talked about two cultures. I
really think that those two cultures separate people who have and people who have not had this experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once.
– The Character of Physical Law, p. 58

Politics
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a
government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to further adventure and the development of the human race.
– “The Uncertainty of Values,” John Danz Lecture Series, 1963

The other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosing leaders — in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth and lying in order to develop a product. This wasn’t the original idea. They are supposed to discuss situations and not just make up slogans. It’s true, if you look in history, however, that choosing political leaders in the United States has been on many different occasions based on slogans.
– Galileo Symposium, “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” September 1964

Education and Teaching
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, “Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.”
– National Science Teachers Association Fourteenth Convention lecture, “What Is Science?” April 1966

The Future
People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future. And now that the future has materialized, we see that in many ways the dreams have been surpassed, but in still more ways there are many of our dreams of today which are very much the dreams of people of the past.
– Galileo Symposium, “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” September 1964 ( )

The many quotations of Richard Feynman in this book were compiled from his writings, interviews, and lectures. As a long-time fan of his, many of them were familiar and nice to encounter again. Some were new to me. A criticism of the book is that it needed more editing. The quotes are arranged into chapters by topic, but within the topic they are not organized. Quotes from the same source might be near each other or not, for no apparent reason. They are not chronological, either. There are also some typographical errors. ( )

Quotations -- nothing but quotations, hundreds and hundreds of quotations -- of physicist extraordinaire Richard P Feynman (1918-1988). Quotations -- some familiar and some not so familiar, some from writings and some from voicings, some repetitious of others and some contradictory of others. The book would make a good supplement or prequel, I think, to any of the several good biographies of the man.