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Who really said it

Research Is to See What Everybody Else Has Seen and Think What Nobody Has Thought

Not Schopenhauer's words — his thought, compressed Arthur Schopenhauer 1788–1860 · German philosopher · Parerga und Paralipomena (1851)
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

The idea is genuinely Schopenhauer’s: he set it down in German in 1851, in § 76 of the second volume of Parerga und Paralipomena. The sentence is not. Schopenhauer never used the word “research,” and Quote Investigator ↗ traces the snappy English form to a 1957 epigraph in Albert Szent-Györgyi’s Bioenergetics — where Szent-Györgyi himself printed it inside quotation marks, signalling he was quoting somebody else.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Research Is to See What Everybody Else Has Seen and Think What Nobody Has Thought” The thought is Arthur Schopenhauer's, from Parerga und Paralipomena, vol. 2, § 76 (Berlin: A. W. Hayn, 1851), p. 93 — written in German, with no word for "research" in it. The familiar English sentence is not his: its earliest documented appearance is as an unattributed epigraph, already inside quotation marks, in Albert Szent-Györgyi's Bioenergetics (New York: Academic Press, 1957), p. 57. The exact circulating wording, with "else," is dated to a Daily Standard (Sikeston, Missouri) filler item of 29 December 1958. Chronology: Quote Investigator, 4 July 2015. — quotle.info · Verbatim: “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.”

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Arthur Schopenhauer — German philosopher · Parerga und Paralipomena (1851). Theme: "Research Is to See What Everybody Else Has Seen and Think What Nobody Has Thought". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where it actually comes from

Work
Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften
Location
Volume 2, § 76, page 93 — A. W. Hayn, Berlin, 1851
Language
German. The passage contains no word for “research.”
Translation
None by Schopenhauer’s hand. The popular English sentence is an anonymous twentieth-century compression, not a translation of § 76.

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. § 76 · 1851

Schopenhauer’s German as reproduced by Quote Investigator ↗ from § 76 of the 1851 Hayn edition. Rendered literally: the task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, as to think, about the thing everyone sees, what no one has yet thought — and that, he adds, is why it takes so much more to be a philosopher than a physicist. The second sentence is always dropped, and it is the one that changes the meaning.

Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1851 to 2008

How the sentence travelled

  • 1851 — the real origin. Schopenhauer publishes Parerga und Paralipomena in Berlin. Quote Investigator ↗ locates the sentence at volume 2, § 76, page 93 of the A. W. Hayn edition — in German, with no mention of research and a closing jab at physicists.
  • 1934 and 1952 — faithful translations that nobody repeats. The same chronology records English renderings by Jan Willem Moll in Phytography as a Fine Art (1934) and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in Problems of Life (1952). Both credit Schopenhauer by name; both are far longer than the line in circulation. Compare them side by side ↗
  • 1957 — the compression appears, unsigned. Albert Szent-Györgyi uses “Research is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought” as a part epigraph in Bioenergetics — inside quotation marks, with no name attached. Wikiquote cites it to page 57 ↗
  • 1958 — the credit slips, and “else” arrives. An untitled filler item in the Daily Standard of Sikeston, Missouri prints the epigraph as Szent-Györgyi’s own words and adds “else” — producing the exact wording quoted today. Quote Investigator dates it 29 December 1958 ↗

Two different rights questions sit on this page, and only one has a clean answer. Schopenhauer’s 1851 German original is long out of copyright, and the excerpt above is quoted from that 1851 text. The famous English sentence is the uncertain part: no author or translator has ever been identified for it, its earliest documented appearance is as an unattributed epigraph in a 1957 book, and the traceable published translations of § 76 (Moll 1934, Bertalanffy 1952, Payne) are modern works with their own rights holders. We therefore assert no public-domain status for the popular wording.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who gets the credit

This one drifted twice — once out of German into an English sentence nobody signed, and once off Schopenhauer onto a run of twentieth-century scientists.

Arthur Schopenhauer Paraphrase

The thought is his; the sentence is not. Schopenhauer wrote § 76 in German in 1851 and used no word for “research” anywhere in it. Quote Investigator ↗ prints three published English translations of the passage — Jan Willem Moll’s in 1934, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s in 1952, and E. F. J. Payne’s — and every one of them is longer and clumsier than the line people quote.

Albert Szent-Györgyi Most common

The Hungarian Nobel laureate used the compressed sentence as an epigraph in Bioenergetics in 1957, but set it in quotation marks — the standard signal that he was quoting rather than coining. A Missouri newspaper dropped the quotation marks on 29 December 1958 ↗, added the word “else,” and the credit has stuck to him ever since.

Erwin Schrödinger Name confusion

A 2008 Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists entry on Schrödinger carries a Bertalanffy-style rendering of the line. Quote Investigator ↗ treats the attribution as spurious, and the resemblance between “Schopenhauer” and “Schrödinger” is the obvious mechanism.

Lewis Thomas Different line

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought” — a further rewrite trading “research” for “discovery” — is recorded in Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ in a 1984 Foreign Affairs piece by Lewis Thomas. If you have seen this variant, it is a cousin of the same sentence, not a separate quotation.

The thought is Schopenhauer’s, from 1851. The sentence people actually quote belongs to nobody in particular: its earliest documented appearance, on page 57 of Szent-Györgyi’s 1957 Bioenergetics ↗, is already inside quotation marks.

Context

A jab at physicists, not a research motto

Schopenhauer’s § 76 is not advice for the laboratory. The sentence everybody quotes is only its first half; the half nobody quotes concludes that this is precisely why it takes so very much more to be a philosopher than a physicist. Cut that away, hand the remainder to a Nobel-winning biochemist, and you get something close to the opposite of what Schopenhauer meant — a compliment to science, extracted from a line written to needle it.

The compression is also what made it survive. The German is a coiling stack of subordinate clauses; the popular English form is fifteen words with a turn in the middle. Accurate translations of § 76 exist and have existed since at least 1934, and none of them ever caught on. The version that travelled is the one that reads like a slogan — which is exactly why it also travelled onto the wrong names.

The word ‘research’ appears nowhere in Schopenhauer’s sentence.

How one newspaper filler item created a Nobel laureate’s most famous quote

Szent-Györgyi did everything right. He used the line as an epigraph in Bioenergetics in 1957 and set it in quotation marks, the ordinary scholarly signal for these are not my words. What he did not do was name a source.

Per Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗, an untitled filler item in the Daily Standard of Sikeston, Missouri, on 29 December 1958 reprinted the epigraph as Szent-Györgyi’s own and slipped in the word “else.” That is the sentence in circulation today. By 1968 it was set in Evan Esar’s 20,000 Quips and Quotes under Szent-Györgyi’s name, and the quotation marks he had been careful to include were gone for good.

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Quote Origin: Research Is to See What Everybody Else Has Seen…quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. A dated chronology running from Schopenhauer’s 1851 German through the 1934 and 1952 translations, the 1957 epigraph, the 1958 Missouri newspaper slip, Evan Esar in 1968 and the Schrödinger mix-up.
Wikiquote — Albert Szent-Györgyien.wikiquote.org

Carries the compressed sentence and cites it to Bioenergetics, Part II: Biological structures and functions, p. 57 (Academic Press, 1957).
Bioenergetics (1957), full scanarchive.org

Szent-Györgyi’s book as published by Academic Press, New York, in 1957 — the volume whose epigraph launched the modern wording.
Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851 — digitizedarchive.org

A scan of the A. W. Hayn (Berlin) first edition Schopenhauer’s line comes from. Useful as an artifact rather than a search tool: the Fraktur OCR is badly mangled.
Parerga and Paralipomena — overviewen.wikipedia.org

Background on the two-volume 1851 collection published by Hayn of Berlin, its thirty-one topical sections, and the modern English translations.
Wikiquote — Arthur Schopenhaueren.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s collection of Schopenhauer’s sourced quotations. The popular English “research” sentence is not among them — which is itself informative.

The man whose thought it was

About Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer

1788–1860 · German philosopher · Parerga und Paralipomena (1851)

Born in Danzig in 1788, Schopenhauer built his system in The World as Will and Representation (1818) and spent decades being ignored for it. Fame arrived only late, largely through Parerga und Paralipomena — the two-volume miscellany of essays and stray thoughts he published with A. W. Hayn of Berlin in 1851, nine years before his death. It is the book that made him quotable, and the book most of his circulating one-liners have been squeezed out of.

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Primary source & the wording’s real trail

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften, vol. 2, § 76 (Berlin: A. W. Hayn, 1851), 93 — in German. The popular English wording is not Schopenhauer's; its earliest documented appearance is as an unattributed epigraph in Albert Szent-Györgyi, Bioenergetics (New York: Academic Press, 1957), 57. Chronology per Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: Research Is to See What Everybody Else Has Seen and Think What Nobody Has Thought," 4 July 2015.

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