Intellectual Achievement Quotes

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

The essence of science is independent thinking, hard work, and not equipment. When I got my Nobel Prize, I had spent hardly 200 rupees on my equipment.

It is characteristic of fundamental discoveries, of great achievements of the intellect, that they retain an undiminished power upon the imagination of the thinker. The memorable experiment of Faraday with a disc rotating between two poles of a magnet, which has borne such magnificent fruit, has long passed into every-day experience; yet there are certain features about this embryo of the present dynamos and motors which even today appear to us striking, and are worthy of the most careful study.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

I respect Israel as hugely special, especially given all the sensitivities around it. The Jews managed to build a country, to elevate it, without anything except people and brains.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

When I won the world championship, in 1972, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, a baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.

[On Cantor's work:] The finest product of mathematical genius and one of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity.

The image of Stephen Hawking - who has died aged 76 - in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.

A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

I am safe in affirming that the proofs of genius given by the Indians of North America place them on a level with whites in the same uncultivated state.

If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man’s property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.

I make fun of Mensa. I don't know a great deal about Mensa - that's the high IQ group - but I say, 'To get into Mensa, you have to have a high IQ, and once you get in, you spend your time congratulating people who are in Mensa with you.' To me that's a pretty stupid way to spend your life.

All men of genius, and all those who have gained rank in the republic of letters, are brothers, whatever may be the land of their nativity.

I wish I could write a book that will be read for as long as our civilization lasts. I would value it much more highly than any business success if I could contribute to an understanding of the world in which we live or, better yet, if I could help to preserve the economic and political system that has allowed me to flourish as a participant.

The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries have various fates: Most burn or unravel in the footsteps of time and the fires of later discovery. But their glory lies in their integrity as unified structures of great complexity and broad implication.

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

Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement; and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge.

The Nobel Prizes are much more than awards to scholars; they are a celebration of civilization, of mankind, and of what makes humans unique - that is their intellect from which springs creativity.