French Chemist Quotes

Antoine Lavoisier

Henri Moissan

Paul Sabatier (chemist)

Jean-Baptiste Dumas

Michel Eugène Chevreul

Charles-Adolphe Wurtz

Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy

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

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

Nicasius le Febure

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)

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.

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 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

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

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

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

Michel Eugène Chevreul

In the bounds of nature, a vacuum, which is nothing, can find no place. There is no power in nature which from nothing could have made the universe, and none which could reduce the universe to nothing: that requires the same virtue.

On a particular substance contained in the seawater.

Title of his work on the discovery of Bromine

Antoine Jérôme Balard

Each man who receives a liberal education today counts chemistry as one of the indispensable parts of his studies.

Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy

The triumph of a theory is to embrace the greatest number and the greatest variety of facts.

Charles-Adolphe Wurtz

In performing experiments, it is a necessary principle, which ought never to be deviated from, that they be simplified as much as possible, and that every circumstance capable of rendering their results complicated be carefully removed.

Antoine Lavoisier

I was an impostor, the worthy associate of a brigand, &c., &c., and all this for an atom of chlorine put in the place of an atom of hydrogen, for the simple correction of a chemical formula!

Auguste Laurent

For us, an atom shall be a small, spherical, homogeneous body or an essentially indivisible, material point, whereas a molecule shall be a separate group of atoms in any number and of any nature.

Marc Antoine Gaudin

Theories are like crutches; to prove that they are good, we must make use of them and walk.

Jean-Baptiste Dumas