I PICKED up an interesting book on Monday (literally: it was on a colleague's desk).
It's called The 1000 Wisest Things Ever Said, and is a compendium of quotations from people ranging from Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill to Saul Bellow and Boris Pasternak. What links them is that they're among the 768 people who have won a Nobel prize of one sort or another since 1901.
Lots of the quotations were new to me, such as John Boyd Orr's: "What is called 'communism' in developing countries in hunger becoming articulate." Orr (who attended Kilmarnock Academy) won the peace prize in 1949 for his campaign to eradicate world hunger.
There's a great quote from Andre Gide: "It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honour."
Bertrand Russell once said: "The state is primarily an organisation for killing foreigners." Ernest Hemingway: "If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it." William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." And Yasser Arafat, whose remains have just been exhumed and re-buried: "Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you."
I also liked this evocative one, from Konrad Lorenz, winner of the medicine prize in 1973: "When it comes to reading galley proofs, I always feel reminded of an awful sight once seen in a prisoner-of-war camp: a man slowly and deliberately eating his own vomit."
A quote by Albert Camus might still seem apposite: "Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators."
Likewise Shimon Peres: "Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable."
By coincidence, yesterday morning we heard of the death, at the age of 93, of Dr Joseph E Murray, who performed the world's first successful kidney transplant and won a Nobel prize for his pioneering work.
I went back to the book just now, and sure enough, there he is, with a solitary quote, on page 156: "My advice to anybody wanting to be a physician," he said in 1990, "is to love people and like taking care of them."
The Wisest Things Ever Said: Wisdom of the Nobel Prize Winners, David Pratt, The Robson Press.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article