“Suggested remedy for the common cold: A good gulp of whiskey at bedtime-it’s not very scientific, but it helps.”

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.

Penicillin cures, but wine makes people happy.

Nature makes penicillin; I just found it.

It was astonishing that for some considerable distance around the mould growth the staphococcal colonies were undergoing lysis. What had formerly been a well-grown colony was now a faint shadow of its former self…I was sufficiently interested to pursue the subject.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on Sept. 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.

Penicillin sat on a shelf for ten years while I was called a quack.

The unprepared mind cannot see the outstretched hand of opportunity.

If penicillin can cure those that are ill, Spanish sherry can bring the dead back to life.

It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.

For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Roentgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new.

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play…but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

I still drink vodka; I’m not an advocate of drinking, but I’m no angel. I don’t like grass, because it just makes me hungry.

If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops.

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.

Don’t give him another thought, baby girl. He wanted a cup of tea; you’re a shot of whiskey.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.