Chemist Quotes

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

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)

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

Arthur Birch (organic chemist)

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

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety!

Kathleen Lonsdale

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

In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, corrupt and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe. For him, truth is so seldom the sudden light that shows new order and beauty; more often, truth is the uncharted rock that sinks his ship in the dark.

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

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

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

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

[Fire is] the most potent Agent that Nature hath furnished us withal under Heaven, to perform the Anatomy of Mixt Bodies.

Nicasius le Febure

The greatest problem encountered by students in geology is the necessity for a complete reorganization of their concepts of space and time.

A successful hypothesis is not necessarily a permanent hypothesis, but it is one which stimulates additional research, opens up new fields, or explains and coordinates previously unrelated facts.

Farrington Daniels

The fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.

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

Günter Wächtershäuser

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

George W. Merck

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

Edward R. Weidlein

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

I consider the teaching and study of the historical development of science as indispensable... Our textbooks fail in this respect.

Richard Willstätter

Observations are useless until they have been interpreted.

Edgar Bright Wilson

The exact verbal definition of qualitative concepts is more often the province of philosophy than of physical science.

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

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.