Stanley B. Prusiner Quotes

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

In life, a lot of great ideas sound insane or absurd at first.

I have generally sought to work on questions that I thought were both interesting and approachable, yet not too widely appreciated. To struggle to make discoveries that would be made by others a short time later seems futile to me.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.

REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE.

The process of discovery in my field is very incremental. But there are moments when you realize you know something about the world nobody else knows. That's extraordinarily exhilarating.

Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.

Sometimes I have compared myself with a scientist or something: when you discover something and you don't expect the whole world to understand it. I always thought I was doing that kind of activity, in art and in music too.

The worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness-which incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit-but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads.

Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.

New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise: So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try.

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

Is creativity some obscure, esoteric art form? Not on your life. It's the most practical thing a business-man can employ.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

Visionaries see the "impossible" as the inevitable.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

The opportunities that everyone cannot see are the real opportunities.

Genius is insanity right up until it works.

The hallmark of creative people is their mental flexibility... Sometimes they are open and probing, at others they're playful and off-the-wall. At still other times, they're critical and faultfinding. And finally they're doggedly persistent in striving to reach their goals.

Creative people are often considered crazy but I believe crazy can be a good thing.

The stupidest person in the room might have the best idea.