Robert Sapolsky Quotes

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

Looking back on my 50-year eclectic journey in research, I am grateful that it has gone as well as it has, although still not clever enough to open the black box of enzyme structure.

I didn't know what kinds of questions to ask in mathematics. In physics, I could see there were things that were known and things that weren't.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

You have to do the research. If you don't know about something, then you ask the right people who do.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

I am always fascinated by the structure of things; why do things work this way and not that way.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

What I love about research is when I'm having a bad day and I can't write, I'll just research some more, I'll learn some more and I'll have better command of the world of the film.

My philosophy is that we should ask the most important question that's capable of being solved.

Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.

Always make the choice to learn. What Princeton taught me was whatever mess you are studying, pull a thread with great persistence 'til you have clarity of thought. Princeton taught me how to solve a problem. How to think - that's what we pull out of this place.

The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.

I like thinking and being able to answer questions that are tough to answer. You have to try to figure out how to get a good answer and look intelligent.

You have to draw on a fair amount of experience in order to be able to put ideas together.

If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned.

A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.