Chemist Quotes

As the History of any Science ought to relate the labours, the discoveries, and the errors of the cultivators of that Science; and to shew the obstacles which they have been obliged to surmount, and the mistaken paths into which they have sometimes been misled; it cannot therefore fail of being very useful to persons engaged in the same pursuits.

Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context.

Charles J. Pedersen

The frontier orbital approach was further developed in various directions by my own group and many other scientists, both theoretical and experimental.

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.

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

The endless frontiers of science now stretching to the stars can provide rich opportunities for the best creative minds.

Edward R. Weidlein

[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.

We must recognize an invisible hand which holds the balance in the formation of compounds. A compound is a substance to which Nature assigns fixed ratios, it is, in short, a being which Nature never creates other than balance in hand, pondere et mensurd.

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.

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.

Knowledge is power, especially when it is hitched to a workhorse.

Orlando Aloysius Battista

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

John Theodore Merz

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

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)

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

Günter Wächtershäuser

At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchhoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchhoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum...

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

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

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

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

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