Top 100 Prize Quotes
#1. It seems to me that the Swedish Academy of Science may be qualifying for the Nobel Peace Prize. It recognises no nationality; it discourages unworthy national feeling and prejudice.
Charles Glover Barkla
#2. This life's a long old road
We shouldn't have to walk alone
But if you find the right companion
You won't feel so worn out when you've grown
All life is precious
And every day's a prize
And sometimes you'll find an answer in the sky
Elton John
#3. A man of power is a prize bargainer. Whatever he offers you, he will take more in return. Your challenge is to know yourself. Give only what you can, while remaining steadfast to your own truths.
Davis Bunn
#4. I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.
Richard P. Feynman
#5. I'm not interested in awards. I never have been. I don't think they are important. Don't get me wrong, if somebody gives me a prize, I thank them as gratefully as I know how, because it's very nice to be given a prize. But I don't think that awards ought to be sought.
John Hurt
#6. 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.
Bill Maher
#7. Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare.
Gene Tunney
#8. No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.
Stephen Hawking
#9. Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas?
Isaac Watts
#11. Life is the ultimate adventure, and Death, the prize that awaits us all.
Chris Claremont
#12. Their imperfect record at awards shows was disappointing, sure, but the best prize of all came when, on February 4, 1986, President Ronald Reagan name-checked and quoted directly from the movie - where we're going, we don't need roads - in his State of the Union address.
Caseen Gaines
#13. The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
#14. As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.
Murray Gell-Mann
#15. Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#16. I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids!
Eddie Van Halen
#17. For life, with all its yields of joy and woe Is just a chance o' the prize of learning love.
Robert Browning
#18. Ladies, whose bright eyes Rain influence, and judge the prize.
John Milton
#19. The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.
Naguib Mahfouz
#20. Our big prize tonight is fifty American dollars to the girl with the most exciting mammalian protuberances.
Frank Zappa
#21. O Love! for Sylvia let me gain the prize,
And make my tongue victorious as her eyes.
Alexander Pope
#22. In 1990, I was in 'The Three Sisters' at the Royal Court and won the Clarence Derwent award for my supporting role as Natasha - the prize was £100. I could have paid the gas bill, but I ended up buying a porcelain and silver Bavarian coffee set in an antiques shop in Penzance.
Lesley Manville
#23. The nature of competition is such that any number of people invariably have their eyes on the same prize you do. Recognize your assets and employ them to the best of your ability.
Larry Bird
#24. We live in a reward-centered society. When I was a child, my father used to say, "It's not whether you win or lose but how well you play the game." I used to think that was about sports, but as an adult, I realize what I create, do, etc., is more important than winning a prize.
Renee Lawless
#25. It is the Nobel Prize I want. It's worth $400,000.
Klaus Kinski
#26. One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.
Sandra Cisneros
#27. In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
J.M. Coetzee
#28. It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.
Kate Atkinson
#29. For it falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
While it was ours.
William Shakespeare
#30. The attraction here is based on man's need to conquer and tame, but also to hoard and deprive others of the prize.
Francisco X Stork
#31. Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.
Richard Harris
#32. My dear countrymen, I hope that you will live to see the day when you learn to believe in other gods than a few movie whores and a couple of prize-fighters.
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
#33. I knew from experience at the Negro Ensemble Company that it wasn't until there was a place controlled by black artists ... that Pulitzer Prize-winning work like 'Ceremonies in Dark Old Men' and 'A Soldier's Play' came to fruition.
Michael Schultz
#34. The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.
Irene Joliot-Curie
#35. The Commonwealth Prize is about celebrating the Commonwealth and the special relationship we have with the ex-colonies - which is part guilt and part warmth - and the Booker Prize isn't an essential part of that, but it is part of that.
Jim Crace
#36. The stabilising power of economic union was one of the reasons the E.U. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Najib Razak
#37. Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Teddy Roosevelt
#38. Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.
Peter Diamandis
#39. It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933.
Stephen Hawking
#40. The Nobel Prize is fine, but the drugs I've developed are rewards in themselves.
Gertrude B. Elion
#41. The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.
P. J. O'Rourke
#42. To set the cause above renown, To love the game beyond the prize, To honor, while you strike him down, The foe that comes with fearless eyes To count the life of battle good and dear the land that gave you birth, And dearer yet the brotherhood ...
Henry Newbolt
#43. The prize was really for the molecule. In 1962, Osamu Shimomura discovered a protein in a jellyfish that caused it to glow bright green. With colleagues, 30 years later, I was able to insert this G.F.P. gene into bacteria and make them turn green.
Martin Chalfie
#44. It is war's prize to take all vantages;
And ten to one is no impeach of valor.
William Shakespeare
#45. Let's try to count the number of Nobel prize-winners that have emerged from scientific centres of excellence like the Weizmann Institute and Haifa's technical university, the Technion. There has to be at least 25.
Zubin Mehta
#46. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.
Alfred Nobel
#47. Once you buy a prize, it's yours to keep.
Pat Sajak
#48. What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy,
The soul's calm sunshine, and the heart-felt joy,
Is virtue's prize.
Alexander Pope
#49. Every time you quit, someone else gets your prize. Every time you make a mistake, you get closer to yours.
Robert Kiyosaki
#50. The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.
Jorge Luis Borges
#51. Nobel prize-calibre geniuses often have certain core autistic features at their heart.
Allan Snyder
#52. We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.
Wynton Marsalis
#53. I remember my first moment onstage was at a 4-H contest at the Pratville Junior High School cafeteria auditorium around 1965. I had my first electric, a Silvertone with the amp built into the case, and I won first prize.
Tommy Shaw
#54. My feelings, as the last ball travelled over the net, and as I realized that the final match was mine, I cannot describe. I felt that here was a prize for all the games I had ever played.
Helen Wills Moody
#55. You can't praise what you don't prize.
John Piper
#56. Don't lose faith. Promise yourself that you will be a success story, and I promise you that all the forces of the universe will unite to come to your aid; you might not feel today or for a while, but the longer you wait the bigger the prize.
George Bernard Shaw
#58. 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.
Myron Scholes
#59. There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#60. May you and I run in such a way to receive the prize of gold when we run the race of passionate faith ...
Angela Thomas
#61. You have to pay the price. You will find that everything in life exacts a price, and you will have to decide whether the price is worth the prize.
Sam Nunn
#62. To preserve itself, male dominance is obliged to prize competition and central control and to turn away from making adjustments to the constantly shifting, personal needs or the problems that relate to women and their children.
Mavis Haut
#63. Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize Man still is bound to rescue or maintain; That nature's God commands the slave to rise, And on the oppressor's head to break the chain. Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, Till not a slave shall on this earth by found.
John Quincy Adams
#64. With the variety of fields within economics, broadly conceived and the increasing specialization of scholarly world, the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize honors not only the individual scholar but, implicitly, also a special field or a distinctive method.
Simon Kuznets
#65. If happiness were easy, everybody would feel it all the time, and it wouldn't seem like such an elusive prize.
Bethenny Frankel
#66. The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.
Charles Saatchi
#67. The thing is, if you make best-sellerdom your goal, you're going to be in trouble. It's a very nice thing to have happen, but if one makes that a goal like, say, a literary writer has the goal of getting the Pulitzer Prize, that's so unpredictable.
Diane Mott Davidson
#68. Success is the prize for those who stand true to their ideas.
Josh Hinds
#69. One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.
Robert Dessaix
#70. Let it go, shake it off, and press on toward the blessings that God has in store for you. Keep your eyes on the prize of a higher calling.
Farshad Asl
#71. A woman who is very secure in herself, what she's about, what she wants to do, who probably figures that she's a prize catch-sooner or later he's going to come around.
Spike Lee
#72. The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.
Philip Reeve
#73. The president already has a Nobel Prize for peace. I think he's shooting for one in fiction.
Trey Gowdy
#74. If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#75. We are pathfinders on a mission, Beholders following the Light, Runners gunning for the prize and Fighters remaining focused ... You have been described, do not accept any other description!
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
#76. When, over fifty years ago, I first became interested in economics - as a discipline that provided the key to social structure and social problems - it never crossed my mind that one day I might be the honored recipient of a Nobel Memorial Prize.
Simon Kuznets
#77. I worship pianos like they are prize diamonds, and I never willfully do damage to them. But I grew up playing guitars, and you treat a guitar like a best friend or a little brother or a lover you have a tempestuous relationship with.
Jamie Cullum
#78. For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia ... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#79. I think I'm comfortable making myself, or my speaker, larger than life if I can then cut myself off at the ankles. The way, in "My Major Prize," the speaker does this drippy performance of sadness and poetry for some unnamed prize committee, only he lets us know that it's all a wry game.
Randall Mann
#80. My eyes widened at the ball of orange fluff squeezing out from under the counter, blinking and stretching.
I looked again, not believing.
"It's a cat," I said, winning the Pulitzer prize for incredible intellect.
Kim Harrison
#81. I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
#82. 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.
Kenneth G. Wilson
#83. I have done nothing important or distinguished since we met except to win the handicap prize, worth ?4 10/- at North Berwick.
Arthur Balfour
#84. The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.
Alan Garner
#85. To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.
Confucius
#86. I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame.
Alexander Smith
#87. Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.
Victor Hugo
#88. All honor to him who shall win the prize. The world has cried for a thousand years. But to him who tries and fails and dies, I give great honor and glory and tears.
Joaquin Miller
#89. I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. Every woman who's met you wants a shot at you. How could you ever think you're the consolation prize?
Jamie McGuire
#90. Concentrate on what will produce results rather than on the results, the process rather than the prize.
Bill Walsh
#91. Natural selection awards no prize for second place.
Thomas Lewis
#92. Let us watch against unbelief, pride, and self-confidence . If we go forth in our own strength, we shall faint, and utterly fall; but having our hearts and our hopes in heaven, we shall be carried above all difficulties, and be enabled to lay hold of the prize of our high calling in Christ Jesus.
Matthew Henry
#93. I give the president credit for at least one thing. He's proven that someone can deserve a Nobel prize less than Al Gore.
Tim Pawlenty
#94. I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.
Molly Antopol
#95. I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#96. 'Reach for a (cigarette) instead of a sweet' - ... advertising slogan..(of) Albert Lasker, (with) Mary Lasker, health philanthropist, and originator of the Lasker Awards, an American version of the Nobel Prize ... and Memorial Sloan Kettering trustees.
Ralph W. Moss
#97. That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Paul Berg
#98. Winning a Nobel Prize isn't about being clever at all. It's about making ... at least in physiology or medicine, it's about making discoveries, and you don't have to be clever to make a discovery, I don't think; it just comes up and punches you on the nose.
Tim Hunt
#99. Winning = adaptation and one step forward to take the prize
Jury Nel
#100. I also won one from the emperor of Japan, with a prize for the arts. That's important.
Marcel Carne
