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.

Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context.

Charles J. Pedersen

The common life of man is full of wonders, Chemical and Physiological. Most of us pass through this life without seeing or being sensible of them, though every day our existence and our comforts ought to recall them to our minds.

James Finlay Weir Johnston

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)

Nitrogen bacteria teach us that Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilizes methods, which we do not as yet know how to imitate.

Chemical research and mountaineering have much in common. If the goal or the summit is to be reached, both initiative and determination as well as perseverance are required. But after the hard work it is a great joy to be at the goal or the peak with its splendid panorama.

Surprisingly, history is much more difficult than chemistry.

Frank Westheimer

On a particular substance contained in the seawater.

Title of his work on the discovery of Bromine

Antoine Jérôme Balard

Man's intellectual development has extended for a period of at least 5,000 years. However, it has been only during the past three centuries that scientists have realized their real objectives and have learned to use what we designate the scientific method.

Ladies and gentlemen, throughout my lecture I have presented to you nothing but speculation.

Günter Wächtershäuser

I had come to the conclusion, that the principal alimentary matters might be reduced to the three great classes, namely the saccharine, the oily and the albuminous.

The achievement of the objective in itself cannot but thrill all chemists, who even before they know the details of the journey can apprehend from their own experience the joys and elations, the disappointments and false hopes, the obstacles overcome, the frustrations subdued, which they experienced who traversed a road to the goal.

Robert Burns Woodward

It is unmatched in its ability to think, to communicate, and to reason. Most striking of all, it has a unique awareness of its identity and of its place in space and time. Welcome to the human brain, the cathedral of complexity.

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

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

This is physical chemistry, formerly a colony, now a great, free land.

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff

The study of blind chance in theory and practice is one of the great performances of the nineteenth century.

John Theodore Merz

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

If the coalescence of the globules of yeast can be ascribed to the presence of vegetable life, the same reason might well be assumed for the coalescence of globules of clay or calcium phosphate.

Jöns Jacob Berzelius

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.

When men began to use their hands and eyes as well as their reason in attempting to get at nature's secrets, doubts arose whether the explanations and hypotheses of the gown-men were not rather strained, and for the most part unsatisfactory.

Thomas Edward Thorpe

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

Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.

Homer Burton Adkins

It is difficult, however, for a person to be comprehensible and at the same time remain scientific, so I must ask you to bear with me.

The essence of chemical science thus finds its full expression in the words of Leonardo da Vinci: "Where nature finishes producing its own species, man begins, using natural things and in harmony with this very nature, to create an infinity of species."

Jean-Marie Lehn