Arthur Schopenhauer? Albert Szent-Györgyi? Erwin Schrödinger? Anonymous?
Dear Quote Investigator: There is a brilliant remark about scientific, artistic, and intellectual progress. Here are four versions:
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody has thought.
Genius is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no one else has thought.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
The task is, not so much to see what no one has seen yet; but to think what nobody has thought yet, about what everybody sees.
This saying has been attributed to the prominent German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and the Nobel-Prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi. Would you please explore this topic?
Quote Investigator: In 1851 Arthur Schopenhauer published a two volume work written in German titled “Parerga und Paralipomena” which contained a collection of long essays together with a series of short numbered passages. The piece numbered 76 included the following. Boldface has been added to excerpts:[1] 1851, Title: Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften, Author: Arthur Schopenhauer, Volume 2, Section: 76, Quote Page 93, Publisher: A. W. Hayn, Berlin. (Google Books Full View) link
Daher ist die Aufgabe nicht sowohl zu sehen was noch keiner gesehen hat, als bei Dem was Jeder sieht, zu denken was noch Keiner gedacht hat. Darum auch gehört so sehr viel mehr dazu, ein Philosoph als ein Physiker zu seyn.
Here are two possible translations into English:
1) So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees. Also for this reason, it takes so very much more to be a philosopher than a physicist.
2) Therefore the problem is not so much, to see what nobody has yet seen, but rather to think concerning that which everybody sees, what nobody has yet thought. For this reason, it also takes very much more to be a philosopher than a physicist.
Albert Szent-Györgyi printed a concise instance of this saying in his 1957 book “Bioenergetics”; however, he placed the statement between quotation marks which signaled that he had not originated the expression. A detailed citation is given further below. The attribution to Erwin Schrödinger appears to be spurious.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
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