Nobel Lecture Quotes

“Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.”
― William Golding

“The world – whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing.

But ‘astonishing’ is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events’ … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lies. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
― Harold Pinter, Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture

“Mutlu olabilmek için her gün bir miktar edebiyatla ilgilenmem gerekiyor.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Father's Suitcase: The Nobel Lecture

“Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.”
― Sheldon L. Glashow

“And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name.”
― Charles Nicolle

“The writer’s method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found “the terms of his appeal”. He appealed, said Conrad, “to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder… our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
― Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

“One can still say that quantum mechanics is the key to understanding magnetism. When one enters the first room with this key there are unexpected rooms beyond, but it is always the master key that unlocks each door.”
― John H. Van Vleck

“Finally, to the theme of the respiratory chain, it is especially noteworthy that David Kellin's chemically simple view of the respiratory chain appears now to have been right all along–and he deserves great credit for having been so reluctant to become involved when the energy-rich chemical intermediates began to be so fashionable. This reminds me of the aphorism: 'The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer'.”
― Peter D. Mitchell

“We know you can never do it properly — once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”
― Toni Morrison

“Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.”
― Robert Woodrow Wilson

“Les pays les plus prospères ont réussi à accumuler des pouvoirs de destruction tels que d'anéantir, cent fois, non seulement tous les êtres humains qui ont existé à ce jour, mais aussi la totalité de tous les êtres vivants qui ont jamais dessiné souffle sur cette planète du malheur.
Un jour comme aujourd'hui, mon maître William Faulkner dit: «Je refuse d'accepter la fin de l'homme." Je tomberais indigne de se tenir dans ce lieu qui était le sien, si je devais pas pleinement conscients que la tragédie colossale qu'il a refusé de reconnaître, il y a trente-deux ans est maintenant, pour la première fois depuis le début de l'humanité, rien de plus qu'un simple possibilité scientifique. Face à cette réalité impressionnante qui a dû sembler une simple utopie à travers tout le temps humain, nous, les inventeurs de contes, qui croire quoi que ce soit, se sentent en droit de croire qu'il n'y a pas encore trop tard pour participer à la création de l'utopie opposée . Une nouvelle et radicale utopie de la vie, où personne ne sera en mesure de décider pour les autres comment ils meurent, où l'amour se révélera vrai bonheur et être possible, et où les races condamnées à cent ans de solitude aura enfin et pour toujours , une deuxième chance sur la terre."
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Nobel lecture (8 Décembre 1982)”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez,

“Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.”
― Olga Tokarczuk