19th-century Chemist Quotes

Dmitri Mendeleev

Wilhelm Ostwald

Svante Arrhenius

Otto Hahn

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff

Hermann Emil Fischer

Fritz Haber

We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.

Albert C. Barnes

Practically everything your eat, taste, wear, smell and see has resulted in some way from the ingenuity of chemists.

Marston T. Bogert

In attempting to discover traces of a science in earliest historic times, one must first disabuse his mind of the idea that he will find it in anything like the elaborated modern form in which he knows it. These natural sciences are the result of a long process of evolution, and the primal form will probably prove a very much disguised one.

Francis Preston Venable

There is inherent in the human mind a desire to find an explanation - or as some would prefer to have it called, a description - of the phenomena of nature, by means of speculations concerning the ultimate constitution of matter.

The little Daisy, which has painted its 'wee crimson-tipped flowers,' puts the chemist and scientific man to shame, for it has produced its leaf and stem and flowers, and has dyed these with their bright colors from materials which he can never change with all his art.

Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest.

Paul Sabatier (chemist)

Avogadro's hypothesis affords a bridge by which we can pass from large volumes of gases, which we can handle, to the minuter molecules, which individually are invisible and intangible.

William Ashwell Shenstone

I have fortunately been proved wrong in that prediction demonstrates how far I underestimated that as science progressively developed and as its nature and attributes became more and more familiar, mankind's appreciation and acceptance of scientific progress has steadily accelerated.

Wilhelm Ostwald

A good theory is one which almost always leads to further discovery, but no theory, however justifiable, can be regarded as final.

William A. Tilden

To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.

Nature has endowed radium alone of all the elements with incurable suicidal monomania.

The search for an element is always captivating. In Mary Elvira Weeks

Speaking exclusively of observational and experimental sciences, it is obvious that progress can be accomplished only at the cost of destroying or modifying current theories; for if a theory suffices to explain facts discovered after its promulgation, knowledge may be increased; but there is no true progress unless our general outlook is altered.

Alfred Walter Stewart

As in common life he who best knows how to meet the many difficulties and to utilise the various opportunities which life presents is the successful man, so in scientific discovery he is successful who is able to seize upon and rightly understand the meaning of the phenomena which all eyes witness but only those of the seer can interpret.

Henry Roscoe (chemist)

Men who are capable of modifying their first beliefs are very rare. This ability was one of the reasons for the success of Claude Bernard and Pasteur. Out of a very vivid imagination they forged new hypotheses all the time but abandoned them with equal ease as soon as experience contradicted them.

Adolf von Baeyer

The end of chemistry is its theory. The guide in chemical research is a theory. It is therefore of the greatest importance to ascertain whether the theories at present adopted by chemists are adequate to the explanation of chemical phenomena, or are at least based upon the true principles which ought to regulate scientific research.

Archibald Scott Couper

Scientists know that research merely discloses parts of the infinite unknown. Paradoxically, the enticing, helpful "unknown" increases as men continue to subtract from it. Progress in every line of experimental science follows the same law. The apparently narrow path gradually expands into unlimited, unexplored territory.

Willis R. Whitney

Science offers us not only a mass of phenomena to be observed, but also a body of truths which have been deduced from these observations; and, without the power of drawing correct inferences from the data acquired, exact observations would be of little value.

Josiah Parsons Cooke

Chemistry is a universal science: it was founded by many whose memories are forgotten. The foundations of chemistry are laid deep in the experiences, the hopes, the visions of mankind.

M. M. Pattison Muir

Physical chemistry is all very well, but it does not apply to organic substances.

William Henry Perkin, Jr.

It will rightly be asked: What is the synthetic principle on which this obviously highly important product of y-methylcyclopentenophenanthrene is built up in nature, and why is it that this particular type which, as founda tion of many substances indispensable to life and of extreme physiological and biological importance, plays such a vital role in the vegetable and animal kingdoms? However, the time has not yet come when we can give an answer to questions so fundamental and so important to an understanding of the workings of Nature. But I am firmly convinced that this problem - like all others - will eventually be solved.

Emil Fischer represents a symbol of Germany's greatness.

There was once an Editor of the Chemical Society, given to dogmatic expressions of opinion, who once duly said firmly that 'isomer' was wrong usage and 'isomeride' was correct, because the ending 'er' always meant a 'do-er' 'As in water?' snapped Sidgwick.

Many thanks for the sending me the book Biology of the Striped Skunk...Frankly, I doubt whether I shall read it or not, unless I happen to have some intimate contact with a skunk which may induce me to learn more about him.

When I look back on my life and consider all the way I have been led, above all I thank God to Whom I owe everything, for all His goodness to me and ascribe to Him all the praise and honour.

William Henry Perkin