Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Marie CurieRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the intense and varied nature of scientific work, highlighting both physical and mental challenges.
Marie Curie's quote emphasizes the duality of her experiences in scientific research, where she faced not only physically demanding tasks but also intricate and delicate operations, particularly in her work with radium. This contrast illustrates the diverse skill sets and resilience required in the field of science, demonstrating that significant achievements often come from a mix of hard labor and meticulous attention to detail.
Themes
ScienceHard WorkResilienceRadiumResearch
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of perseverance in scientific discovery.
More from Marie Curie
All quotes →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 CurieRead
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 placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery has its own beauty.
Marie CurieRead
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 CurieRead
During the year 1894, Pierre Curie wrote me letters that seem to me admirable in their form. No one of them was very long, for he had the habit of concise expression, but all were written in a spirit of sincerity and with an evident anxiety to make the one he desired as a companion know him as he was.
Marie CurieRead
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 CurieRead
Similar quotes
Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.
Elizabeth BlackburnRead
Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.
Stephen Jay GouldRead
Every discovery opens a new field for investigation of facts, shows us the imperfection of our theories. It has justly been said, that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded.
Humphry DavyRead
Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.
James C. MaxwellRead
Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.
Kurt VonnegutRead
While I thought myself employed only in forming a nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.
Antoine LavoisierRead