French Scientist Quotes

He was high enough still to have been hurt by the fall, had it not been for - the large skirts of his Gown, which being swelled by the Wind, gently upheld him till he set Foot on ground.

Cyrano de Bergerac

The farther an experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

Irène Joliot-Curie

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 influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.

The researcher's art is first of all to find himself a good boss.

André Michel Lwoff

The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.

Error is all around us and creeps in at the least opportunity. Every method is imperfect.

Charles Nicolle

It is because science is sure of nothing that it is always advancing.

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.

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

Jean-Baptiste Dumas

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

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

To give us the science of motion God and Nature have joined hands and created the intellect of Galileo.

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

Charles-Adolphe Wurtz

One of the most important features about time is its irreversibility. Time flows on and never comes back. When the physicist is confronted with this fact he is greatly disturbed. All the laws of physics in their elementary forms are reversible.

Léon Brillouin

On a particular substance contained in the seawater.

Title of his work on the discovery of Bromine

Antoine Jérôme Balard

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

Michel Eugène Chevreul

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

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

The biologist who studies heredity is very much like a mathematician who is studying a very complex function with the aid of partial differential equations and who tries to analyze the properties and the function about a point without being able as in the case of an elementary function to study it in itself, directly in all its respects.

Maurice Caullery

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.

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.

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)

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

Nicasius le Febure