Nobel Prize Quotes

“It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
― Richard Dawkins

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”
― Richard Feynman

“From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

[Recalling in 1936 the discovery of the nucleus in 1909, when some alpha particles were observed instead of travelling through a very thin gold foil were seen to rebound backward, as if striking something much more massive than the particles themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.]”
― Ernest Rutherford

“Peace is the music of every soul. Our glory lies in understanding, listening and honoring that music”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion

“Credo che non ti amerei tanto se in te non ci fosse nulla da lamentare, nulla da rimpiangere. Io non amo la gente perfetta, quelli che non sono mai caduti, non hanno inciampato. La loro è una virtù spenta, di poco valore. A loro non si è svelata la bellezza della vita.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Literary Awards offer no guarantee that the fame they create will last. Today, not many readers know the authors who won the Nobel prize in literature in the thirties, forties, fifties or even nineties. But, who doesn’t know William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo or Jean-Paul Sartre who stood the test of time without winning a prestigious prize?”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“And of these few charitable billionaires, how many are motivated by greed for a Nobel peace prize, I don’t know. Yes, call me a cynic, but I am absolutely sure that hadn’t there been such a thing as the Nobel peace prize or similar versions of national, or state-level, or independent accolades, many of these millionaires and billionaires would have given up on their charitable endeavours. After having everything, a rich man seeks applause and reverence, for there is guilt in his mind. The guilt of having everything in this world.”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“History teaches us that Literary Book Awards have always been the quickest and easiest way to achieve global fame. They have helped countless authors to shoot to stardom. But this fame usually fades away after their death, unlike William Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens who never won any awards, yet they continue to be read, quoted and remembered as the greatest writers of all time.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House-- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
― John F. Kennedy

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Since we cannot see Christ, we cannot express our love to Him. But we do see our neighbor, and we can do for him what we would do for Christ if He were visible.”
― Mother Teresa, No Greater Love

“You too can win Nobel Prizes. Study diligently. Respect DNA. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Avoid women and politics. That's my formula.”
― George Beadle

“But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“Strange star-like object over Oslo right before Obama arrives. A gift of a golden medal given by a group of wise men... Nah.”
― Craig Ferguson

“Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity.”
― Abdus Salam

“Be the change which you want to happen to the world”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

[Comment when told that he had won a Nobel prize, referring to the drug he discovered for the treatment of heart disease.]”
― James Whyte Black

“Whoever invented knock-knock jokes should get a no-bell prize.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Gags and Extracts

“For years the physicist Donna Strickland was not deemed notable enough for an entry. She finally got her place in Wikipedia on the day she won the Nobel Prize. Surely that cannot be what it takes to be remembered? No man is held to such a standard.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“But Melquíades' tribe, according to what the wanderers said, had been wiped off the face of the earth because they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Farklılıkların paradan kaynaklanabileceği hiç aklıma gelmezdi, insanların doğuştan temiz ya da pasaklı, zevk sahibi ya da sallapati olduğunu sanırdım. Ayyaşlık, konserve et, kenefin yanındaki çiviye asılmış gazete kağıtları, bunları kendilerinin seçtiğini ve böyle mutlu olduklarını sanırdım. Yığınla ders almak, kafa yormak, okumak gerekiyormuş böyle düşünmeyi bırakmak için, hele çocukken, insan her şeyin değişmez bir şekilde belirlenmiş olduğuna inanıyor.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Armoires Vides

“A good way to measure the ubiquity of the male perspective masquerading a the human perspective is to check out the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in six categories: literature, medicine, chemistry, peace, physics, and economics. Who we are as a species, what we value, where we expend our energy and our resources, and our priorities, goals, and dreams can be charted through the development of these categories. As of 2018, Nobel Prizes in total have been awarded to 853 men and 51 women. One hundred ten Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded since 1901, and only 14 of those were awarded to women... The world would have been different-and better-if women had had equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace, and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human. If you can convince me otherwise, you should receive a Nobel Prize." The Greatest Books - pg. 80-81”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes

“On a certain occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the chestnut tree and invited him to a game, José Arcardio Buendía would not accept, because according to him he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Dying is easy. Happiness is hard.”
― José Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda

“Člověk nikdy nemůže být vším a ještě méně ničím, neboť můžeme, koneckonců, utéct před vším, kromě nás samotných.”
― José Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda

“Now the Nobel Prize should be the Nobel Surprise. I do not draw any other meaning than as the label to degrading of yourself prize”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“The 2019 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded for discovering how ‘Hypoxia Inducible Factor’ senses and adapts cellular response to oxygen availability.”
― Steven Magee, Toxic Altitude

“Флемінг ніколи не розглядав пеніцилін як антибіотик. Через десять років це зробили Говард Флорі та Ернст Чейн, яких фінансував Фонд Рокфеллера, і вони втілили спостереження Флемінга в перший диво-препарат. Цей засіб був такий дефіцитний і потужний, що під час Другої світової війни лікарі армії США відновлювали його з сечі людей, яких ним лікували, щоб потім використовувати повторно. У 1945 році Флорі, Чейн та Флемінг розділили між собою Нобелівську премію.”
― Джон М. Баррі, Пандемія: Моторошна історія іспанського грипу