Quotes by Chemists

I am a misanthrope, but exceedingly benevolent; I am very cranky, and am a super-idealist. ... I can digest philosophy better than food.
Alfred Nobel
You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
Miracles sometimes occur but one has to work terribly hard for them.
Chaim Weizmann
I have always suspected that correctness is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say.
Friedrich Wasiman
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
James Conant
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
James Bryant Conant
The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.
Sir Humphrey Davy
You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments then the wind blows your footprints away.
Arlene Blum
Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble: prayer is a life attitude.
Walter A. Mueller
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing at whatever cost must be attained.
Marie Curie
The way of progress is neither swift nor easy.
Marie Curie
You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments then the wind blows your footprints away.
Arlene Blum
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
James Bryant Conant
Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble: prayer is a life attitude.
Walter A. Mueller
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing at whatever cost must be attained.
Marie Curie
The way of progress is neither swift nor easy.
Marie Curie
Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.
Louis Pasteur
Each honest calling each walk of life has its own elite its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie
Orthodoxy my Lord said Bishop Warburton in a whisper - "orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy."
Joseph Priestley
Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.
James Bryant Conant
My poor are my best patients. God pays for them.
Herman Boerhaave
In the field of observation chance favours the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Blessed is he who carries within himself a god and an ideal and who obeys it - an ideal of art of science or gospel virtues. Therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions.
Louis Pasteur
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Louis Pasteur
The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the disarrangement of all the pieces, one of the players should wish, from the inspection of the new place occupied by each piece, to determine that which it originally occupied.
Auguste Laurent
Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.
John C. Polanyi
[Henry Cavendish] fixed the weight of the earth; he established the proportions of the constituents of the air; he occupied himself with the quantitative study of the laws of heat; and lastly, he demonstrated the nature of water and determined its volumetric composition. Earth, air, fire, and water—each and all came within the range of his observations.
Thomas Edward Thorpe
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Chance favours the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Everything is balanced. Everything physical (matter/energy) goes back and forth in balanced circles, cycles, or the equivalent. Birth-death, old-young, big-small, strong-weak, start-stop, up-down, rich-poor, beginning-end, fast-slow, hot-cold, pain-pleasure, win-lose, day-night, full-empty, high-low, in-out, success-failure, united-divided, give-receive, creation-destruction, on-off, positive-negative, etc.Positive and negative forces moving in balance are the physical universe.
Michael Smith
Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,—the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements.
Humphry Davy
I took a glass retort, capable of containing eight ounces of water, and distilled fuming spirit of nitre according to the usual method. In the beginning the acid passed over red, then it became colourless, and lastly again all red: no sooner did this happen, then I took away the receiver; and tied to the mouth of the retort a bladder emptied of air, which I had moistened in its inside with milk of lime lac calcis, (i.e. lime-water, containing more quicklime than water can dissolve) to prevent its being corroded by the acid. Then I continued the distillation, and the bladder gradually expanded. Here-upon I left every thing to cool, tied up the bladder, and took it off from the mouth of the retort.— I filled a ten-ounce glass with this air and put a small burning candle into it; when immediately the candle burnt with a large flame, of so vivid a light that it dazzled the eyes. I mixed one part of this air with three parts of air, wherein fire would not burn; and this mixture afforded air, in every respect familiar to the common sort. Since this air is absolutely necessary for the generation of fire, and makes about one-third of our common air, I shall henceforth, for shortness sake call it empyreal air, [literally fire-air] the air which is unserviceable for the fiery phenomenon, and which makes abut two-thirds of common air, I shall for the future call foul air [literally corrupted air].
Carl Wilhelm Scheele
I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that--signed his work in blood. ... When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.
Neil Bartlett
A demonstrative and convincing proof that an acid does consist of pointed parts is, that not only all acid salts do Crystallize into edges, but all Dissolutions of different things, caused by acid liquors, do assume this figure in their Crystallization; these Crystalls consist of points differing both in length and bigness from one another, and this diversity must be attributed to the keener or blunter edges of the different sorts of acids.
Nicolas Lemery
We can distinguish three groups of scientific men. In the first and very small group we have the men who discover fundamental relations. Among these are van't Hoff, Arrhenius and Nernst. In the second group we have the men who do not make the great discovery but who see the importance and bearing of it, and who preach the gospel to the heathen. Ostwald stands absolutely at the head of this group. The last group contains the rest of us, the men who have to have things explained to us.
Wilder Dwight Bancroft
This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.
Antoine Lavoisier
In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more.
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
Will fluorine ever have practical applications?It is very difficult to answer this question. I may, however, say in all sincerity that I gave this subject little thought when I undertook my researches, and I believe that all the chemists whose attempts preceded mine gave it no more consideration.A scientific research is a search after truth, and it is only after discovery that the question of applicability can be usefully considered.
Henri Moissan
[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define 'serendipity' as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.
Irving Langmuir
The discovery of an interaction among the four hemes made it obvious that they must be touching, but in science what is obvious is not necessarily true. When the structure of hemoglobin was finally solved, the hemes were found to lie in isolated pockets on the surface of the subunits. Without contact between them how could one of them sense whether the others had combined with oxygen? And how could as heterogeneous a collection of chemical agents as protons, chloride ions, carbon dioxide, and diphosphoglycerate influence the oxygen equilibrium curve in a similar way? It did not seem plausible that any of them could bind directly to the hemes or that all of them could bind at any other common site, although there again it turned out we were wrong. To add to the mystery, none of these agents affected the oxygen equilibrium of myoglobin or of isolated subunits of hemoglobin. We now know that all the cooperative effects disappear if the hemoglobin molecule is merely split in half, but this vital clue was missed. Like Agatha Christie, Nature kept it to the last to make the story more exciting. There are two ways out of an impasse in science: to experiment or to think. By temperament, perhaps, I experimented, whereas Jacques Monod thought.
Max F. Perutz
A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.
Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff
There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it.
Louis Pasteur
It is because I know all that science can bring to the world that I shall continue my efforts to ensure that it contributes to the happiness of all men, whether they be white, black, or yellow, and not to their annihilation in the name of some divine mission or other.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.
Peter Debye
The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of the internal architecture of molecules. A series of experiments directed toward such a goal is the object of this paper.
Wilhelm Körner
A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.
J.Williard Gibbs
Planck...and Bohr...have invented systems containing electrons of which the motion produces no effect upon external charges...[N]ot only [is this] inconsistent with the accepted laws of electromagnetism, but I may add, is logically objectionable, for that state of motion which produces no physical effect whatsoever may better be called a state of rest.
G.N.Lewis
Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.
Franz Karl Achard
That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.
Primo Levi
[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits.
Nevil Vincent Sidgwick
The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.
Alfred Nobel
Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called the falstaff.
J.R. Partington
We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.
Joseph Priestley
An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the "I don't know" and "I do not remember" that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.
Primo Levi
Unhappy: People look around and think, why are there so many people that are unhappy? We have progressed so far, yet people are still unhappy. Why isn’t this world the wonderful place it could be? Changing the world doesn’t change us.It does not matter how much we progress materially; it will not change anything. Only learning and seeing the truth will change us, and thus change everything.The truth transforms a mortal man into an immortal spiritual being.It does this because the truth just shows you what you truly are, and that changes everything. The truth does the same thing for the way we see the world and for the same reason. It shows you life clearly; it shows you true life for the first time.
Michael Smith