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.

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

For me, the creative process, first of all, requires a good nine hours of sleep a night. Second, it must not be pushed by the need to produce practical applications.

William Lipscomb

Chymistry is an Art that teaches how to separate the different substances which are found in Mixt Bodies...

We know light best in its diluted form: a gentle rain of photons falling from the sun that illuminates and warms. More concentrated, light is a furnace and a terror.

George M. Whitesides

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

Science is not only for illumination, for the mastery of nature's resources and the improvement of man's estate, it is also for the satisfaction of the soul.

George William Gray

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

The shape and form of Chymical Vessels is almost infinite...

Christopher Glaser

It almost always happens that true, but exaggerated, coloring is more agreeable than absolute coloring.

Michel Eugène Chevreul

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

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 most valuable and most precious of all Metals is the most useless in Physick, except when considered as an Antidote to Poverty.

Étienne François Geoffroy

The number of known metals had been increased by one — from 17 to 18.... A few years ago we thrilled to hear of the discovery of the final planet by Sir William Herschel. He calls the new member of our solar system Uranus. I propose to borrow from the honor of that great discovery and call this new element Uranium.

Martin Heinrich Klaproth

That we live on land is, in the grander scheme of things, best regarded as an anomaly, or even an eccentricity — albeit with sound evolutionary justification. The story of life is, if we retain a true sense of proportion, a story of life at sea.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

Ernst Otto Fischer

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

Observations are useless until they have been interpreted.

Edgar Bright Wilson

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 is today one of the few common languages of mankind; it can provide a basis for understanding and communication of ideas between people that is independent of political boundaries and ideologies.

George Kistiakowsky

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 not yet a science. We are very far from the knowledge of first principles. We should avoid every thing that has the pretensions of a full system. The whole of chemical science should, as yet, be analytical, like Newton's Optics, in the form of a general law, at the very end of our induction, as the reward of our labour.

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.

There is not a "pure" science. By this I mean that physics impinges on astronomy, on the one hand, and chemistry and biology on the other. And not only does each support neighbors, but derives sustenance from them. The same can be said of chemistry. Biology is, perhaps, the example par excellence today of an "impure" Science.