Nobel Prize quotes

Explore the prestigious Nobel Prize winners and their inspiring contributions to humanity on this enlightening category.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

- John Steinbeck

So long as there are men, there wll be wars.

- Albert Einstein

It is those who devote themselves to killing who have power.

- Elias Canetti

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.

- Winston Churchill

Science advances one funeral at a time.

- Max Planck

At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time.

- Paul Dirac

When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game os chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen.

- Paul Dirac

When Erwin Schrödinger went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

- Paul Dirac

What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.

- Paul Dirac

There are always more people who prefer to speak than to listen.

- Paul Dirac

The successful development of science requires a proper balance to be maintained between the method of building up from observations and the method of deducing by pure reasoning from speculative assumptions.

- Paul Dirac

The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.

- Paul Dirac

The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.

- Paul Dirac

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

- Albert Einstein

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.

- Richard P. Feynman

Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

- Richard P. Feynman

This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.

- Winston Churchill

Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.

- Bertrand Russell

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

- Bertrand Russell

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

- Bertrand Russell