Alfred Nobel Quotes

My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

Contentment is the only real wealth.

Nature is man's teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.

I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.

My home is where I work, and I work everywhere.

It is not sufficient to be worthy of respect in order to be respected.

Good wishes alone will not ensure peace.

For my part, I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use.

Justice is to be found only in the imagination.

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.

A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.

I regard large inherited wealth as a misfortune, which merely serves to dull men's faculties. A man who possesses great wealth should, therefore, allow only a small portion to descend to his relatives. Even if he has children, I consider it a mistake to hand over to them considerable sums of money beyond what is necessary for their education. To do so merely encourages laziness and impedes the healthy development of the individual's capacity to make an independent position for himself.

I would not leave anything to a man of action as he would be tempted to give up work; on the other hand, I would like to help dreamers as they find it difficult to get on in life.

Worry is the stomach's worst poison.

Lying is the greatest of all sins.

Lawyers have to make a living, and can only do so by inducing people to believe that a straight line is crooked.

Perhaps my dynamite plants will put an end to war sooner than your [pacifist] congresses. On the day two army corps can annihilate each other in one second all civilized nations will recoil from war in horror.

Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.

The truthful man is usually a liar.

Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.

One can state, without exaggeration, that the observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.

I am not aware that I have deserved any notoriey, and I have no taste for its buzz.

The only true solution would be a convention under which all the governments would bind themselves to defend collectively any country that was attacked.

It is my express wish that in awarding the [Nobel 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.