Curie's Quotes

#1. If but a small part of Mme. Curie's strength of character and devotion were alive in Europe's intellectuals, Europe would face a brighter future.

Albert Einstein

#2. proportional to the absolute temperature, in quantitative agreement with theory (Curie's law).

Erwin Schrodinger

#3. It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.

Joni Mitchell

#4. We bombarded aluminum with alpha rays ... then after a certain period of irradiation, we removed the source of alpha rays. We now observed that the sheet of aluminum continued to emit positive electrons over a period of several minutes.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

#5. Is it right to probe so deeply into Nature's secrets? The question must here be raised whether it will benefit mankind, or whether the knowledge will be harmful.

Pierre Curie

#6. Thus the radio elements formed strange and cruel families in which each member was created by spontaneous transformation of the mother substance: radium was a "descendant" of uranium, polonium a descendant of radium.

Eve Curie

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

Irene Joliot-Curie

#8. The various reasons which we have enumerated lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element which we propose to give the name of radium.

Marie Curie

#9. The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy ... luminous energy.

Marie Curie

#10. Now is the time to understand more, so we fear less.

Marie Curie

#11. After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

Marie Curie

#12. The time necessary for the disappearance of half the atoms, called the half-life, is a fundamental characteristic of each radio-element; according to the substance, the value of the half-life varies between a fraction of a second and millions of years.

Irene Joliot-Curie

#13. When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.

Marie Curie

#14. Radium is not to enrich any one. It is an element; it is for all people.

Marie Curie

#15. You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end,each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a genaral responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think can be most useful.

Marie Curie

#16. Life is not easy for any for us.

Marie Curie

#17. I have the best husband one could dream of; I could never have imagined finding one like him. He is a true gift of heaven, and the more we live together the more we love each other.

Marie Curie

#18. The death of my husband, coming immediately after the general knowledge of the discoveries with which his name is associated, was felt by the public, and especially by the scientific circles, to be a national misfortune.

Marie Curie

#19. This means that we have here an entirely separate kind of chemistry for which the current tool we use is the electrometer, not the balance, and which we might well call the chemistry of the imponderable.

Marie Curie

#20. So perished the hope founded on the wonderful being who thus ceased to be. In the study room to which he was never to return, the water buttercups he had brought from the country were still fresh.

Marie Curie

#21. The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

Christine Quinn

#22. I believe international work is a heavy task, but that it is nevertheless indispensable to go through an apprenticeship in it, at the cost of many efforts and also of a real spirit of sacrifice: however imperfect it may be, the work of Geneva has a grandeur that deserves our support.

Marie Curie

#23. Just remember you will find that one special love that you know is right but for some reason just doesn't last

Marie Curie

#24. Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Marie Curie

#25. We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves.

Marie Curie

#26. My husband and I were so closely united by our affection and our common work that we passed nearly all of our time together.

Marie Curie

#27. First principle: never to let one's self be beaten down by persons or by events.

Marie Curie

#28. One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

Marie Curie

#29. Stability can only be attained by inactive matter.

Marie Curie

#30. I am one of those who think, like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

Marie Curie

#31. My experiments proved that the radiation of uranium compounds can be measured with precision under determined conditions and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element of uranium.

Marie Curie

#32. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty. Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world.

Marie Curie

#33. Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.

Marie Curie

#34. It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.

Marie Curie

#35. I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies ...

Ernest Rutherford

#36. When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

#37. Each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity.

Marie Curie

#38. Each emission of an alpha or beta ray accompanies the transmutation of an atom; the energy communicated to these rays comes from inside the atom.

Irene Joliot-Curie

#39. You must never be fearful of what you are doing when it is right.

Marie Curie

#40. Certein bodies ... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.

Marie Curie

#41. Madame Curie didn't stumble upon radium by accident. She searched and experimented and sweated and suffered years before she found it. Success rarely is an accident.

B.C. Forbes

#42. Gertrude Stein ... the Madame Curie of language. Because in her deep research she has crushed thousands of tons of matter to extract the radium of the word.

Mina Loy

#43. The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France, with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living.

Marie Curie

#44. In England and the United States, where physicists have at their disposal equipment of very high voltages, several new elements were prepared using protons and deuterons as projectiles.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

#45. I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician, he is also a child place before natural phenomenon, which impress him like a fairy tale.

Marie Curie

#46. Pierre Curie came to see me and showed a simple and sincere sympathy with my student life. Soon he caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and he asked me to share that life.

Marie Curie

#47. Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war.

Pierre Curie

#48. Radium could be very dangerous in criminal hands.

Pierre Curie

#49. I met Pierre Curie for the first time in the spring of the year 1894 ... A Polish physicist whom I knew, and who was a great admirer of Pierre Curie, one day invited us together to spend the evening with himself and his wife.

Marie Curie

#50. I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.

Marie Curie

#51. Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Catherine Coulter

#52. That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life - this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.

Irene Joliot-Curie

#53. Nothing in this world is to be feared ... only understood.

Marie Curie

#54. I've written books as acts of discovery: things I need to know and that I need to touch. And it's very dangerous work to deal with the most toxic internal elements ... I feel like Madame Curie at my computer. I feel like I should be hemorrhaging from my eyes and ears.

Kate Braverman

#55. We have to destroy the radioactive brain of Madame Curie.

A. Lee Martinez

#56. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.

Anthony Burgess

#57. Nothing is impossible in the United States.

Eve Curie

#58. Scythe Curie seemed a mix of many emotions, but she folded them all away, like clothes that no longer fit, and closed the drawer. Citra expected she never spoke of this to anyone else, and would probably never speak of it again.

Neal Shusterman

#59. There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

Marie Curie

#60. I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.

Marie Curie

#61. Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one - Marie, the famous Madame Curie - and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

Isaac Asimov

#62. In chemical terms, radium differs little from barium; the salts of these two elements are isomorphic, while those of radium are usually less soluble than the barium salts.

Marie Curie

#63. We must have perserverence and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something.

Marie Curie

#64. It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

Marie Curie

#65. Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You
were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to
me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural
references were the sign of a colonized mind.

Kamila Shamsie

#66. Let's face it: however old-fashioned and out of date and devaluated the word is, we like the way of living provided by democracy.

Eve Curie

#67. You can only analyze the data you
have. Be strategic about what to
gather and how to store it

Marie Curie

#68. It would be a fine thing, in which I hardly dare believe, to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams.

Pierre Curie

#69. In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.

Marie Curie

#70. It's always good to marry your best friend.

Marie Curie

#71. In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

Marie Curie

#72. When you talk to young girls these days about their role modles, very few mention a chemist like Madame Curie or an astrophysicist and astronaut like Sally Ride, or a zoologist like Jane Goodall. Instead, they look to someone like Madonna ...

W. Ann Reynolds

#73. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#74. I was taught the method for advancement is not quick or simple.

Marie Curie

#75. I was only fifteen when I finished my high-school studies, always having held first rank in my class. The fatigue of growth and study compelled me to take almost a year's rest in the country. I then returned to my father in Warsaw, hoping to teach in the free schools.

Marie Curie

#76. Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was especially popular: the 'it' element of its day. Radium glows an eerie blue-green in the dark, giving off light for years without any apparent power source. People had never seen anything like it.

Sam Kean

#77. We believe the substance we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal not yet observed, related to bismuth by its analytical properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed we propose to call it polonium, from the name of the original country of one of us.

Marie Curie

#78. We have shown that it is possible to create a radioactivity characterized by the emission of positive or negative electrons in boron and magnesium by bombardment with alpha rays.

Irene Joliot-Curie

#79. During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals.

Marie Curie

#80. A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

Marie Curie

#81. Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.

Marie Curie

#82. It is because I know all that science can bring to the world that I shall continue my efforts to ensure that it contributes to the happiness of all men, whether they be white, black, or yellow, and not to their annihilation in the name of some divine mission or other.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

#83. The first unquestionable proofs of the transformation of elements into different chemical elements have been provided by the study of the phenomena of radioactivity.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

#84. It is important to make a dream of life and a dream reality.

Pierre Curie

#85. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.

Marie Curie

#86. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

Marie Curie

#87. In 1906, just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.

Marie Curie

#88. I have always attached great importance to the manner in which an experiment is set up and conducted ... the experiment should be set up to open as many windows as possible on the unforeseen.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

#89. Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.

Francis Perrin

#90. Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the radium.

Marie Curie

#91. I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times, I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success; at others, I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.

Marie Curie

#92. I shall devote only a few lines to the expression of my belief in the importance of science ... it is by this daily striving after knowledge that man has raised himself to the unique position he occupies on earth, and that his power and well-being have continually increased.

Marie Curie

#93. I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.

Marie Curie

#94. Some people help thousands of people directly, like Marie Curie or Susan B. Anthony. Others help us by inspiring us, like Amelia Earhart. But you do have to help someone.

Brad Meltzer

#95. The radiation of radium was "contagious"-Contagious like a persistent scent or a disease. It was impossible for an object, a plant, an animal or a person to be left near a tube of radium without immediately acquiring a notable "activity" which a sensitive apparatus could detect.

Eve Curie

#96. It was at the beginning of 1934 while working on the emission of these positive electrons that we noticed a fundamental difference between that transmutation and all the others so far produced; all the reactions of nuclear chemistry induced were instantaneous phenomena, explosions.

Irene Joliot-Curie

#97. There is no doubt that radium is transformed spontaneously into an active gas, radon, emitting at the same time alpha particles, or helions.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

#98. Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

#99. Scientist believe in things, not in person

Marie Curie

#100. We Americans are mildly interested, of course, in reading about the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, but what we really yearn to know is the name of the uncommemorated French female who first mixed a sauce bearnaise.

Frank Crowninshield