Chemist Quotes

Dmitri Mendeleev

Antoine Lavoisier

Wilhelm Ostwald

Svante Arrhenius

Humphry Davy

Otto Hahn

Albertus Magnus

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

The field was essentially stuck, but following the well known scientific approach known as "sheer blind luck," we stumbled upon the protein that is the answer to the question: do water channels exist?

One or two atoms can convert a fuel to a poison, change a color, render an inedible substance edible, or replace a pungent odor with a fragrant one. That changing a single atom can have such consequences is the wonder of the chemical world.

The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry.

In science, conjecture drives both experiment and theory for it is only by forming conjectures (hypotheses) that we can make the direction of our experiments and theories informed. If such and such is true, then I should be able to do this experiment and look for this particular result or I should be able to find this theoretical formulation. Conversely, experiment and theory drive conjecture. One makes a startling observation or has a sudden insight and begins to speculate on its significance and implications and to draw possible conclusions (conjecture).

Winds have ever been considered, with reason, as having a principal share in producing changes of weather, and therefore they demand a particular regard in meteorology.

[Hypotheses were] part of the scaffolding of the building of science [rather] than as belonging either to its foundations, materials, or ornaments.

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Dorothy Hodgkin

What one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous-that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.

Scientists need to exchange ideas in an informal place.

In performing experiments, it is a necessary principle, which ought never to be deviated from, that they be simplified as much as possible, and that every circumstance capable of rendering their results complicated be carefully removed.

Antoine Lavoisier

Error is transient; truth alone is eternal. Error is only the shadow cast by truth, when its rays are arrested on their path by human ignorance and intellectual opacity.

Justus von Liebig

We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.

Albertus Magnus

Science, which deals with the infinite, is itself without bounds.

Dmitri Mendeleev

Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context.

Charles J. Pedersen

To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher. It is only a matter of time before the whole edifice crumbles.

The minds of most men, like their bodies, grow stiff with age and unreceptive of new impressions.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

There is very little difference between men and women in space.

... when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.

K. Barry Sharpless

Te reaction types used for functional group exchanges are collected into seven traditional categories [Acid-base reactions, Substitution reactions, Elimination reactions, Addition reactions, Nucleophilic acyl addition, Oxidation reactions, Reduction reactions].

Michael B. Smith

Surprisingly, history is much more difficult than chemistry.

Frank Westheimer

Chemists think in the highly visual nanoscopic world of atoms and molecules, but they work in the tangible world of macroscopic laboratory apparatus. These two approaches to the chemical sciences cannot be divorced.

David W. Oxtoby

University of California at Berkley (UC Berkley) is one of the most outstanding universities, and the Chemistry Department there ranks first amongst the universities of the world in research performance. This department was established by G. N. Lewis, who is considered to be the father of modern chemistry.

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.