Chemist Quotes

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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

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

Orlando Aloysius Battista

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

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

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

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

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...

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

John Theodore Merz

The fact is the physical chemists never use their eyes and are most lamentably lacking in chemical culture. It is essential to cast out from our midst, root and branch, this physical element and return to our laboratories.

Henry Edward Armstrong

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.

Medicine is for the patient. Medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits.

George W. Merck