Top 512 Nobel Quotes & Sayings

Of course I've enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, nobody's going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I'm standing by, ready to receive it, but it's a problem, it's a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he'd succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature.

There are kind of two kinds of awards you can get as a scientist. One is Nobel-like in character: it's for one big thing, for a big revolutionary discovery. And it's wonderfully well known, and of course every scientist would love to get a Nobel prize. And there's a few other similar awards. They're for individual blockbuster discoveries.

Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.

No vegetarian has been able to achieve a single Nobel prize. It is a clear-cut condemnation of vegetarianism. Why do all the Nobel prizes go to non-vegetarians? - because vegetarian food does not contain those proteins which create intelligence. And unless we provide those proteins, intelligence cannot grow. The body is a very delicate phenomenon and it needs a very well balanced diet.

I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.

There's another totally fraudulent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore hadn't done anything but make a movie that itself was filled with misrepresentations about the amount of ice the poor polar bears have to live on, doctored photos. He said in his acceptance speech in 2007, getting a Nobel Peace Prize, that the North Pole would be ice free by 2013. Today the truth is, there is a record amount of arctic ice for this time of year. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.

[Bob Dylan] is a worthy laureate for the Nobel Prize.

The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

I'm an idiot who won the Literature Nobel Prize.

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

I think it is a mistake to judge science by Nobel Prizes.

My co-winners, Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, and I wish to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for this very great honor. We each feel privileged and humbled to be named the winners of the 2010 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

There is no magical formula for winning a Nobel Prize.

It is the Nobel Prize I want. It's worth $400,000.

I want to see a game designer nominated for a Nobel Prize.

My first reaction on being awarded the Nobel Prize was, actually, I thought of Fischer Black, my colleague. He unfortunately had passed away. And there was no doubt in my mind that if he were still alive, he would have been a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize.

People ask me often [whether] the Nobel Prize [was] the thing you were aiming for all your life, and I say that would be crazy. Nobody would aim for a Nobel Prize because, if you didn't get it, your whole life would be wasted. What we were aiming at was getting people well, and the satisfaction of that is much greater than any prize you can get.

The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.

My children have often asked me why I never received a Nobel Prize. I used to tell them it was because the Nobel committee couldn’t make up its mind which of my projects to recognize.

With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore.

The Nobel prizes memorialize Alfred Nobel's faith in the contribution that human thought, directed to science and art, can make to human welfare.

George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ...Literature"

The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people... than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature.

The point is not that [Bob] Dylan doesn't need a Nobel to attest to how good he is (although he doesn't.) It's that pop music, pop music of any kind, doesn't need the Nobel committee to damn it with the faint praise of such an award to its sole chosen representative.

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.

I won't lie, I didn't know there was a concert. I've always known about the Nobel Peace Prize and the different prizes given out for science and this and that, but I didn't know there was a concert the day after. When they said, 'You're going to perform in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize concert,' I was like, 'All right, I'm there.'

National Review once opined, many years ago, that, every year, the Nobel peace prize should go to the U.S. secretary of defense: The American military is the number-one guarantor of peace in the world. But maybe something like a Nobel freedom prize would be a more appropriate award for Reagan than a peace prize.

I did not know that I can win the Nobel Prize.

I think the Nobel Prize helps for a number of reasons. Number one, if I can be frank, there is these people will feel by getting a Nobel Prize that I'm one of them, that it is possible to contribute on the world map of science and technology. And the other thing also which I'm hoping for is that the government in Egypt is willing and interested in promoting science and technology and this is an ideal time now to be able to do something.

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

The Nobel Prize is fine, but the drugs I've developed are rewards in themselves.

I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm not aiming for the Nobel Peace Prize!

The disgrace of one's people brings sorrow to the Nobel minded.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

You would be amazed at the number of doors a Nobel Prize opens.

It's no secret that Europeans and Americans win most Nobel prizes.

I should get the Nobel peace prize - screw Bono.

The Nobel award occasions a unique celebration of the vision of science by the public at large. The prestige the prize confers today is largely due to the extraordinary diligence of the Nobel committees.

Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

It's impressive that a man [Dalai Lama], on the day after his Nobel Prize was announced, in October, 1989, said to me, "I really wonder if my efforts are enough?" Most of us, if we just won the Nobel Prize, would think this is vindication, or at last there's a chance for Tibet. He's the rare person who thinks, as a Buddha would, "I don't know if I've done enough, I don't know if I will do enough."

Nobody really expects a Nobel Prize call.

The prestige of the Nobel Prize is such that one is suddenly promoted to a new status.

The Nobel Prize is worth $1.5 million, but that's not the issue. Do the distinguished scientists who win the Nobel Prize need the money? Probably not. The honor is more important the money, and that's the case with the prize for African leadership as well.

I used the Nobel money to buy a house and for the education of my children.

I was never going to be one of Nobel prize winners.

Krugman has been a columnist for the Times for a long enough time, covering a sufficient variety of political events, for us to deduce that he is a political nitwit. Other Nobel laureates have been nitwits, for instance, Bertrand Russell. There are a lot of political nitwits in this world. Perhaps the Times could give Krugman a cooking column. He would be its Nobel Prise-winning cooking columnist.

It was quite a sight to see Obama next to President Hu. Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize in his basement, and Hu has a Nobel Peace Prize winner in his.

I am proud to perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert.

I'm not sure whether I could win a Nobel Prize or not, but the Nobel Committee called me, and, 'You got the Nobel Prize.' So, I was so, so happy, and I was so surprised.

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

Two years ago I was on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to my close friend, the writer Liu Xiaobo, who is imprisoned in China. To me it was confirmation that universal values and a moral code do exist, and that the point of the Nobel Prize is to encourage writers to stand up for this moral code. Last Thursday I was once again on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt when I heard that the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to Mo Yan. He is a state poet. I am utterly bewildered. Do these universal values not exist after all?

Nobody really expects a Nobel Prize call