Roald Hoffmann Quotes

I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.

Chemistry is not torture but instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff, and if you give it a chance, it will not only blow your mind but also give you a deeper understanding of your world.

There's nothing colder than chemistry.

I had a great chemistry teacher and found it really interesting to learn how things are made up and how they work.

We all teach ... the chemistry of Lavoisier and Gay-Lussac.

I have been so electrically occupied of late that I feel as if hungry for a little chemistry: but then the conviction crosses my mind that these things hang together under one law & that the more haste we make onwards each in his own path the sooner we shall arrive, and meet each other, at that state of knowledge of natural causes from which all varieties of effects may be understood & enjoyed.

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

My special fascination has been to understand better the world of chemistry and its complexities.

If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.

I do not know if I am mistaken, but it seems that one can obtain more truths, important to Humanity, from Chemistry than from any other Science.

You don't buy chemistry, nor do you manufacture it, it is what it is.

I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.

I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.

Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something.

Molecular chemistry, the chemistry of the covalent bond, is concerned with uncovering and mastering the rules that govern the structures, properties and transformations of molecular species.

But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects.

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

Chemistry is good for fun - it's like baseball. It has its role for small children, but I can't see an adult being concerned with it.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

As early as 1912, we worked on the problem of the hydrogenation of organic substances with the aid of highly compressed hydrogen.