Best Quotes About Chemistry

From Marie Curie to Adam Sandler

A female chemist with a syringe
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This is a collection of chemistry quotes, relating to the science of chemistry or quotations from chemists about chemistry.

Musings on Chemistry

Marie Curie: “Scientist believe in things, not in persons”

Antonio Perez: "Digital imaging is as much about chemistry as it is about semiconductors."

Tony Wilson: "Every band needs its own special chemistry. And Bez was a very good chemist."

John Tesh: "I grew up wanting to be a musician, but my parents were sure I would starve to death. So, they put me in physics and chemistry. That eventually blew up, and I got into radio."

H. L. Mencken: "It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."

Edward Thorndike: "Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology."

John Pople: "Leaving England was a painful decision, and we still have some regrets about it. However, at that time, the research environment for theoretical chemistry was clearly better in the U.S."

Auguste Comte: "Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?"

Camille Paglia: "Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it."

Michael Polanyi: "No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry."

Thomas Huxley: "Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third."

Peter Hook: "The chemistry involved made everything Factory did quite special."

Johannes P. Muller: "Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry."

Charles Babbage: "To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance."

Tim Hardaway: "You have to look at how chemistry develops."

Chemistry in Education

Roald Hoffmann: "I am a teacher, and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates, and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry."

James W. Black: "I did help to set up an undergraduate course in medicinal chemistry and made progress in modeling and analyzing pharmacological activity at the tissue level, my new passion."

William Standish Knowles: "At Harvard, I majored in chemistry with a strong inclination toward math."

Dennis Rodman: "Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something."

Knute Rockne: "I enjoy talking to my football men and my chemistry classes and I feel sure that they are quite interested in what I have to say."

Rudolph A. Marcus: "During my McGill years, I took a number of math courses, more than other students in chemistry."

John Pople: "I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943."

Steve Blake: "I fell in love with Scotland and made good friends here, so I stayed after graduating with Honours in Chemistry."

Maya Lin: "I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up."

Paul D. Boyer: "In marked contrast to the University of Wisconsin, Biochemistry was hardly visible at Stanford in 1945, consisting of only two professors in the chemistry department."

James Rainwater: "In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics."

Jack Steinberger: In the evenings I studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, the weekends I helped in the family store."

Kenneth G. Wilson: "My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage."

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen: "The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work."

The Nature of Chemistry

Kenichi Fukui: "But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects."

Adam Sandler: "Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it."

Frederick Soddy: "Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it."

Inspired by Chemistry

Donald Cram: "Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired."

Sydney Brenner: "I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house."

Robert B. Laughlin: "I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs."

Richard Ernst: "However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library."

Robert Huber: "I learned easily and had time to follow my inclination for sports (light athletics and skiing) and chemistry, which I taught myself by reading all textbooks I could get."

Martin Lewis Perl: "I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set."

Geoffrey Wilkinson: "My first introduction to chemistry came at a quite early age through my mother's elder brother."

Rudolph A. Marcus: "My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set."

Opportunities in Chemistry

Kenichi ukui: "Chemistry itself knows altogether too well that - given the real fear that the scarcity of global resources and energy might threaten the unity of mankind - chemistry is in a position to make a contribution towards securing a true peace on earth."

George Andrew Olah: "I was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was able to establish a small research group in organic chemistry, housed in temporary laboratories of an industrial research institute."

George E. Brown, Jr.: "Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation."

Wilhelm Ostwald: "It has pleased no less than surprised me that of the many studies whereby I have sought to extend the field of general chemistry, the highest scientific distinction that there is today has been awarded for those on catalysis."

Advances in Chemistry

Paul Berg: "That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry."

Derek Harold Richard Barton: "The first serious applications were in triterpenoid chemistry."

Paul Dirac: "The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved."

Jeremy Rifkin: "We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology."

Dixie Lee Ray: "The organic material, as the laws of chemistry state, can neither be created nor destroyed."

Michael Polanyi: "And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry."

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Helmenstine, Anne Marie, Ph.D. "Best Quotes About Chemistry." ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/quotes-about-chemistry-606801. Helmenstine, Anne Marie, Ph.D. (2023, April 5). Best Quotes About Chemistry. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/quotes-about-chemistry-606801 Helmenstine, Anne Marie, Ph.D. "Best Quotes About Chemistry." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/quotes-about-chemistry-606801 (accessed March 28, 2024).