Periodic Table Quotes

• Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.

  Primo Levi

  Understanding, Tables, Matter

  Primo Levi (1995). “The Periodic Table”, Schocken

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• About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

  Sidney Altman

  Book, Years, Saws

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• What the ocean was to the child, the Periodic Table is to the chemist.

  Karl Barry Sharpless

  Children, Ocean, Tables

  Nobel lecture, 2001.

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• Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

  Diane Ackerman

  Healing, Elements, Tables

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds”, p.27, Vintage

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• If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else...

  Bill Nye

  Brain, Body, Tables

  "Bill Nye the Science Guy: Don't Worry, Your Phone Isn't Making You Dumb". Interview with Wilson Rothman, gizmodo.com. March 19, 2010.

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• The element of surprise wasn't allowed near the Periodic Table.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  Elements, Tables, Surprise

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• A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

  Albert Einstein

  Education, Creativity, School

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• For me too, the periodic table was a passion. ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.

  Freeman Dyson

  Passion, Science, Thinking

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• For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

  C.P. Snow

  Fall, Eye, Science

  C.P. Snow (2010). “The Search”, p.30, House of Stratus

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• Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones.

  Janine Benyus

  Book, Toxic, Use

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• Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moon, Law, Nuts

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I still have a vivid memory of my excitement when I first saw a chart of the periodic table of elements.

  Joe Murray

  Memories, Elements, Tables

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• I woke up to the world of science when my high school chemistry teacher introduced me to the elegantly ordered periodic table.

  Isadore Singer

  Teacher, Teaching, School

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• Tell me it's never been done. Because the only real laws in this world-the only things we really know-are the two postulates of relativity, the three laws of Newton, the four laws of thermodynamics, and Maxwell's equation-no, scratch that, the only things we really know are Maxwell's equations, the three laws of Newton, the two postulates of relativity, and the periodic table. That's all we know that's true. All the rest are man's laws

  Dean Kamen

  Real, Men, Law

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• Vince Russo destroyed the Periodic Table as he only recognises the element of surprise.

  Jim Cornette

  Wrestling, Elements, Tables

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• It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.

  Edward Boyden

  Thinking, Cells, Brain

  "Ed Boyden: The brain is like a computer, and we can fix it with nanorobots". Interview with Ian Tucker, www.theguardian.com. March 10, 2012.

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• ... and holy hell the chocolate is so intense and pure it should be named an element and given a spot on the periodic table. It would be Ch, which isn't even taken.

  Laini Taylor

  Taken, Healing, Chocolate

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• The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.

  Thomas Harris

  Thinking, Iron, Elements

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• Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

  Adam Gopnik

  Accomplishment, Adults, Relief

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

  Oliver Sacks

  Dream, Memories, Confused

  "Uncle Tungsten". Book by Oliver Sacks, 2001.

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• I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.

  Saul Bellow

  Book, Essentials, Tables

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• Sydney! Stop. Think of something else. Conjugate Latin verbs. Recite the periodic table.

  Richelle Mead

  Latin, Thinking, Verbs

  Richelle Mead (2013). “The Indigo Spell: A Bloodlines Novel”, p.112, Penguin

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• You can find that sort of regularity in Stock Exchange quotations.
  [Expressing his lack of confidence in reported regularities in the periodic classification of elements.]

  Robert Bunsen

  Elements, Regularity, Lack Of Confidence

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• Do they always flirt with biblical quotes?" Asil asked Tad. In long-suffering tones, Tad said, "They can flirt with the periodic table or a restaurant menu. We've learned to live with it. Get a room you guys."

  Patricia Briggs

  Biblical, Flirting, Long

  "Frost Burned". Book by Patricia Briggs, January 28, 2014.

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