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.
After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.
I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.
I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.
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, at whatever cost, must be attained.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.
There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.
We cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something.
We must not forget that 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. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
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