Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Quotes

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.

Water, the Hub of Life. Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium. Water is the most extraordinary substance! Practically all its properties are anomolous, which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery. Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.

In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

Think boldly. Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Don't miss small details, keep your eyes open and be modest in everything except your aims.

Nature is one. It is not divided into physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics.

The key to happiness is not to get more, but to enjoy what we have and to fill the empty frame of our lives instead of enlarging it.

Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.

Research is not a systematic occupation but an intuitive artistic vocation.

If structure does not tell us anything about function, it means that we have not looked at it correctly.

If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.

A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.

The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.

Whatever a man does he must do first in his mind.

Through the ages, man's main concern was life after death. Today, for the first time, we find we must ask questions about whether there will be life before death.

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.

[A vitamin is] a substance you get sick from if you don't eat it.

I am not religious, but I am a pious man... A religious man has a definite religion. He says "God is there" or "God is there," "God is there." "Your god is not my god, and that's all." But the pious man, he just looks out with awe, and says, "where is God?" And "well, I don't understand it and I would like to know what this creation really means." That is a pious man, who is really touched by the greatness of nature and of the creation.

The source of this energy is the sun's radiation.

Knowledge is a sacred cow, and my problem will be how we can milk her while keeping clear of her horns.

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.

Life is water, dancing to the tune of solids.

Without energy life would be extinguished instantaneously, and the cellular fabric would collapse.

The American Cancer Society tried to ruin my research foundation.