As for me prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.
This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
Do not trust your memory it is a net full of holes the most beautiful prizes slip through it.
Anyone could be in the orchestra or sports team or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.
I'm hosting weekend retreats all over America. It is like a 24-hour slumber party for moms. We laugh eat play games get massages win prizes talk about parenting and even cry a bit.
Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.
Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.
May this plain statement of facts prevail on the friends of the rising generation to interpose for their welfare that the education of children may no longer be to parent and master a lottery in which the prizes bear no proportion to the enormous number of blanks.
The prizes go to those who meet emergencies successfully. And the way to meet emergencies is to do each daily task the best we can.
When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.
Of life's two chief prizes beauty and truth I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.
I've also long since realized that the way to really engage children is to give out prizes it's amazing how it concentrates their minds.