Chemist Quotes

• If you want to become a chemist, you will have to ruin your health. If you don't ruin your health studying, you won't accomplish anything these days in chemistry. Liebig's advice to Kekulé.

  Justus von Liebig

  Advice, Want, Ruins

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• Chemists do not usually stutter. It would be very awkward if they did, seeing that they have at times to get out such words as methylethylamylophenylium.

  William Crookes

  Awkward, Would Be, Seeing

  "The Norton History of Chemistry" by William H. Brock, W W Norton & Co Inc., (p xxvi), 1993.

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• I saw Linus Pauling as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

  Max Perutz

  Memories, Greatness, Men

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• Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist.

  Ira Remsen

  Organic Chemistry, Ifs

  "The Life of Ira Remsen" by F.H. Getmen, (pp. 70-71), 1940.

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• The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.

  Primo Levi

  Animal, Air, Overcoming

  Primo Levi (1995). “The Periodic Table”

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• [When questioned on his longevity] First of all, I selected my ancestors very wisely. ... They were long-lived, healthy people. Then, as a chemist, I know how to eat, how to exercise, keep my blood circulating. ... I don't worry. I don't get angry at people. I don't worry about things I can't help. I do what I can to make the world a better place to live, but I don't complain if things aren't right. As a scientist I take the world as I find it.

  Joel Henry Hildebrand

  Wisdom, Exercise, Science

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• Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

  Walt Whitman

  Encouragement, Art, Science

  Walt Whitman (1868). “Poems”, p.46

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• What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Philosophy, Science, Law

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.133, University of Chicago Press

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• [The popular impression about some chemists is that] the aquafortis and the chlorine of the laboratories have as effectually bleached the poetry out of them, as they destroy the colours of tissues exposed to their action.

  George Wilson

  Tissues, Chlorine, Action

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• Gay-Lussac was quick, lively, ingenious and profound, with great activity of mind and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of all the living chemists in France.

  Humphry Davy

  Gay, Science, Profound

  Humphry Davy (1839). “The Collected Works: Memoirs of the life of Sir Humphry Davy”, p.167

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• Will fluorine ever have practical applications?
  It is very difficult to answer this question. I may, however, say in all sincerity that I gave this subject little thought when I undertook my researches, and I believe that all the chemists whose attempts preceded mine gave it no more consideration.
  A scientific research is a search after truth, and it is only after discovery that the question of applicability can be usefully considered.

  Henri Moissan

  Truth, Believe, Science

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• We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Nature, Science, Curiosity

  Oliver Goldsmith (1847). “A history of the earth and animated nature, with an intr. view of the animal kingdom tr. from the Fr. of baron Cuvier, notes [and] a life of the author by W. Irving”, p.73

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• I must confess the language of symbols is to me
  A Babylonish dialect
  Which learned chemists much affect;
  It is a party-coloured dress
  Of patch'd and piebald languages:
  'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,
  Like fustian heretofore on satin.

  Sir Richard Phillips

  Latin, Party, Learning

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• Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.

  George Iles

  Science, Fields, Common

  George Iles (1918). “Canadian Stories”

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• There is in the chemist a form of thought by which all ideas become visible in the mind as strains of an imagined piece of music. This form of thought is developed in Faraday in the highest degree, whence it arises that to one who is not acquainted with this method of thinking, his scientific works seem barren and dry, and merely a series of researches strung together, while his oral discourse when he teaches or explains is intellectual, elegant, and of wonderful clearness.

  Justus von Liebig

  Science, Thinking, Ideas

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• I have spent some months in England, have seen an awful lot and learned little. England is not a land of science, there is only a widely practised dilettantism, the chemists are ashamed to call themselves chemists because the pharmacists, who are despised, have assumed this name.

  Justus von Liebig

  Learning, Science, Land

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• Albertus [Magnus] ... debased the doctrine of Aristotle with the itch of the chemists flowing with the bloody flux of quicksilver and the stench of sulphur.

  Georgius Agricola

  Doctrine, Flux, Bloody

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• A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.

  Robert Bunsen

  Science, Physicist

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• Dead is when the chemists take over the subject.

  Arthur Leonard Schawlow

  Subjects

  "Arthur Schawlow" by Steven Chu and Charles H. Townes. "Biographical Memoirs", Volume 83, p. 202, www.nap.edu. 2003.

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• A chemist who does not know mathematics is seriously handicapped.

  Irving Langmuir

  Doe, Mathematics, Handicapped

  Irving Langmuir (1962). “The Collected Works of Irving Langmuir: Langmuir, the man and the scientist, including a biography by Albert Rosenfield”

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• The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love

  Khalil Gibran

  Love, Inspirational, Regret

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• The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

  John Ruskin

  Steps, Practicals, Geologist

  John Ruskin (1873). “Pt. 3, sections 1-2 of the imaginative and theoretic faculties”, p.8

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• We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge.

  William Wordsworth

  Pain, Struggle, Knowledge

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth (2015). “Lyrical Ballads and other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (Including Their Thoughts On Poetry Principles and Secrets): Collections of Poetry which marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature, including poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Dungeon, The Nightingale, Dejection: An Ode”, p.211, e-artnow

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• When the chemist makes gloves, he usually cannot help making them in pairs for both hands.

  Henry Edward Armstrong

  Hands, Gloves, Pairs

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• The responsibility for maintaining the composition of the blood in respect to other constituents devolves largely upon the kidneys. It is no exaggeration to say that the composition of the blood is determined not by what the mouth ingests but by what the kidneys keep; they are the master chemists of our internal environment, which, so to speak, they synthesize in reverse.

  Homer Smith

  Responsibility, Blood, Mouths

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