We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.

I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.

We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.

I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.

Everybody has to learn for the first time.

I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.

To have the recognition of your colleagues is great. The public attention is a mixed blessing.

If it takes you 20 or 25 years to establish yourself in one field, you really ought to be careful not to stray too far.

I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.

I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it.

I hope I've lived a life of science whose style will encourage younger people.

I believe I am a person with unusual talents. I think I'd be a liar or stupid if I were to deny that.

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.

I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

I have many shortcomings. I feel very lucky to have been able to have what I've had.

Life's a hobby.

As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things.

I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.

My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.

A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.

All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals.

Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that.

I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.

If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications.

So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.

Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy.

I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it.

I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while.

I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

I would rather take the role and work and make my own money and self respect than to have sex with someone who has a lot of money.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

If you improve a teacher's self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher's overall effectiveness across the curriculum.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

To be able to throw one's self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman's smile - that is happiness.