Nobel Prize Speeches (nobelprize.org)

[Gamma Ray]

Greetings, my fantastic community! Let's develop together an interesting thread!

We can learn English and expand our vocabulary by reading interesting speeches by Nobel Laureates. We can dilate our comprehension, our knowledge, our wisdom by reading speeches of winners of Nobel Prize. We can search for new ideas in speeches. Laureate is a winner in case you're not familiar with a word.




Primary ideas of this thread:

1. Expansion and dilatation of our knowledge. Knowing who is a winner, what he had created, how he/she was inspired.

2. Improving our comprehension of language in process of reading.




Take into consideration before post here:

1. Add only Nobel Prize Winners and their speeches.

2. Needless to post whole speech. Add a passage from a speech that you personally like and want to share with us.

3. Mention who is author of the speech, year and in what category laureate won.

4. Use quotes brackets for respect of the author of a speech.

The very first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901 to the French poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme, who in his poetry showed the "rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect". Over the years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has distinguished the works of authors from many different languages and cultural backgrounds. The Literature Prize has been awarded to unknown masters as well as authors acclaimed worldwide.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy.



I would like to start the thread by posting a passage from speech by writer and dramatist Harold Pinter.


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
Harold Pinter

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

[birdeen's call]

1996, Wisława Szymborska

Let us recall that the pride of Russian poetry, the future Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was once sentenced to internal exile precisely on such grounds. They called him "a parasite," because he lacked official certification granting him the right to be a poet...

Several years ago, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Brodsky in person. And I noticed that, of all the poets I've known, he was the only one who enjoyed calling himself a poet. He pronounced the word without inhibitions.

Just the opposite - he spoke it with defiant freedom. It seems to me that this must have been because he recalled the brutal humiliations he had experienced in his youth.

In more fortunate countries, where human dignity isn't assaulted so readily, poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind. And yet it wasn't so long ago, in this century's first decades, that poets strove to shock us with their extravagant dress and eccentric behavior. But all this was merely for the sake of public display. The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them, strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront - silently, patiently awaiting their own selves - the still white sheet of paper. For this is finally what really counts.

[5jj]

"We desire peace - and that is why we have never resorted to physical force. We crave for justice - and that is why we are so persistent in the struggle for our rights, We seek freedom of convictions - and that is why we have never attempted to enslave man's conscience nor shall we ever attempt to do so.

"We are fighting for the right of the working people to association and for the dignity of human labour. We respect the dignity and the rights of every man and every nation. The path to a brighter future of the world leads through honest reconciliation of the conflicting interests and not through hatred and bloodshed. To follow that path means to enhance the moral power of the all-embracing idea of human solidarity."


Lech Wałęsa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.