Chemist Quotes

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

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.

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

Boyle entertains the hypothesis of a universal matter, the concept of atoms of different shapes and sizes, and the possibility of existence of substances that might properly be called elements... The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas,...as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however... avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or "corpuscles" as he calls them are a constant element of his thought.

John Maxson Stillman

The maxim that the "best is the cheapest" does not apply to food.

Wilbur Olin Atwater

Funny, I'd forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you're more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew - seeing them freshly - old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.

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

Michel Eugène Chevreul

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.

The details of a research career are dictated partly by accident, but largely by inclinations and temperament.

Arthur Birch (organic chemist)

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.

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.

Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the natural sciences. Its objects, so frequently visible, and therefore familiar, being always remote and inaccessible, do not lose their dignity.

Benjamin Silliman Jr.

As in common life he who best knows how to meet the many difficulties and to utilise the various opportunities which life presents is the successful man, so in scientific discovery he is successful who is able to seize upon and rightly understand the meaning of the phenomena which all eyes witness but only those of the seer can interpret.

Henry Roscoe (chemist)

We believe in atoms, because Nature seems to use them, and we break them up continuously because we do not know where to stop. There are various methods of spanning the distance from nothing to something.

Robert Angus Smith

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.

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.

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.

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

John Theodore Merz

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

I have fortunately been proved wrong in that prediction demonstrates how far I underestimated that as science progressively developed and as its nature and attributes became more and more familiar, mankind's appreciation and acceptance of scientific progress has steadily accelerated.

Wilhelm Ostwald

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

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.

Practically everything your eat, taste, wear, smell and see has resulted in some way from the ingenuity of chemists.

Marston T. Bogert

Observations are useless until they have been interpreted.

Edgar Bright Wilson

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)