Stress is bad for your health.

That fear and excitement sometimes feel quite similar and you can misinterpret one for the other.

I think I actually wrote it in one of my poems is that my decline has been the making of me - I forget how I put it. Yeah, simply more reflective. I haven't got the excuse of moving forward just on impulse anymore, which I did, I think, for a long, long time.

Worry about the things you can control and don’t worry about the things you can’t.

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.  I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.

the colonel said I shouldn't tell them how the neutrons work and all the details because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to keep it safe.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research.  They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while.  It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now.  The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem.  It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy solution for me where I don’t have to teach.  Never.

Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys.  You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students.  Nothing!

At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by.  But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work.  I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!  This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long.  Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time.  I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further.  I was convinced that from the war and everything (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.