Organic Compounds Quotes

There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics.

Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.

Carbon is the stuff of life, and it's the stuff of everything used by human society. All of our materials are made of carbon or of substances, such as steel or glass, which are produced through the utilization of carbon.

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

I am the mild-mannered organic chemistry teacher at the University of Oklahoma.

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

The organic material, as the laws of chemistry state, can neither be created nor destroyed.

Cellulose has physical and chemical properties that make it difficult to access and difficult to break down.

As soon as chemists have a definite conception of the internal structure of the molecule of an organic compound, they are able to tackle the task of producing these substances by artificial methods, i.e. by synthesis, as we call it.

Most commercial products that contain organic molecules possess at least one carbon-carbon double bond, or if one is not present, it is likely that an olefin was used in its preparation. This being the case, the potential applications of olefin metathesis are endless.

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo stillmore complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.

Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.

By 1954, as an assistant professor with a group of three graduate students, I was able to initiate more complex experimental projects, dealing with the structure, stereochemistry and synthesis of natural products. As a result of the success of this research, I was appointed in 1956, at age twenty-seven, as professor of chemistry.

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favor compared with the products of nature, the living cell of the plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life.

Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.

I am a creature of chemicals.

It is impossible to encircle the hips of a girl with my right arm and hold her smile in my left hand, then proceed to study the two items separately. Similarly, we can not separate life from living matter, in order to study only living matter and its reactions. Inevitably, studying living matter and its reactions, we study life itself

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

Synthesis is the process of making a natural product, or some other substance, artificially, in the lab, one step at a time, from extremely simple building blocks.

The structural or biogenetic relations of plant products as deduced from the recognizable architectural components of the molecules have been consistent guides in my investigations.

In bitter almond oil, like in a great number of other substances that previously had been counted among the 'aromatic compounds' on behalf of their strong smell, a derivative of benzene is present. The special properties of benzene and its derivatives are caused by the typical arrangement of their carbon atoms.

Chemistry was my college interest. Cooking is about chemistry.

In organic chemistry, we have learnt to derive from compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen, i.e. from the hydrocarbons, all other types of combinations, such as alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, acids, etc.

Organic compounds exist in which a hydrogen atom, joined to the carbon, acquires acid properties as a result of the proximity of certain functional groupings.