“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven”: did Feynman say it?

Where it comes from

This one turns up on quote sites as pure Feynman. It does come from him, in a way: he said it out loud in November 1955, in a public address called “The Value of Science” at the National Academy of Sciences’ autumn meeting on the Caltech campus. Engineering and Science printed the talk that December, and we opened Caltech’s scan of the printed pages for this check.

But read the paragraph around it and you’ll see he was quoting. On page 13 he says he “learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to Honolulu”. In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a little about Buddhism to a group of tourists and ended by telling them he had something to say “that they would never forget—and I have never forgotten it.” Then:

“It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion: ‘To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.’”

So the popular wording is exact, but Feynman gave the credit to someone else. We haven’t traced the proverb further back than his telling, and we don’t try to here.

What he used it for

The proverb was there to make a point that is his own. Just before the Honolulu story, he says:

“Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad—but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.”

That’s the first value of science in his talk: it lets us do things. The proverb shows why that power is uncomfortable. Without clear instructions about which gate is which, he says, the key “may be a dangerous object to use, but it obviously has value. How can we enter heaven without it?” And the instructions, he adds, would be worthless without the key.

Then he moves on to the two values he cared about more: the fun of finding things out, and the freedom to doubt. We check lines from those parts of the same talk in “the imagination of nature” and “a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty”.

Our take

If you put Feynman’s name under the key line on its own, you’re crediting him with a proverb he was careful to credit to someone else. The fair way to quote it is “as Feynman put it, borrowing a Buddhist proverb he heard in Honolulu”. Or quote the line that really is his: “Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad—but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.”