Marie Sklodowska-Curie (November 7, 1867 - July 4, 1934) was a Polish and naturalized French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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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.
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 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.
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.
After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.
We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something.
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It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement- all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual... The greatest scientific deed of her life— proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them— owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed.
Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not
corrupted.
-Albert Einstein
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
Categories: Marie Curie, Quotes of the day
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