21 Quotes by Marie Curie

05/14/2024 by

I’m always intrigued by people who achieve success despite all the odds working against them. One such person is Marie Curie, a woman who made a name for herself in what was then an exclusively male profession in an age when women were very much second-class citizens. So, let’s explore some quotes by Marie Curie.

Marie Curie was a physicist and chemist who made pioneering contributions to the study of radioactivity.

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields (Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911).

Marie Curie’s research laid the foundation for the development of nuclear physics and the treatment of cancer. She discovered two new elements, Polonium and Radium, and conducted ground-breaking research on their properties.

Marie Curie offers us some lessons worthy of note. What are the key lessons? (1) Find something that matters to you, (2) Pursue your interest with passion, and (3) Don’t let anyone or anything stop you.

Anyway, without further ado, here are 21 quotes by Marie Curie to get you thinking today.

Quotes by Marie Curie (1-10):

  1. Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
  2. I am among those who think that science has great beauty.
  3. In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.
  4. I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.
  5. One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.
  6. There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.
  7. I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.
  8. Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
  9. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.
  10. After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

Quotes by Marie Curie (11-21):

  1. I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.
  2. 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.
  3. I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.
  4. 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 must be attained.
  5. You 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.
  6. Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.
  7. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty. Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world.
  8. In 1906, just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. All my mind was centred on my studies, which, especially at the beginning, were difficult. In fact, I was insufficiently prepared to follow the physical science course at the Sorbonne, for, despite all my efforts, I had not succeeded in acquiring in Poland a preparation as complete as that of the French students following the same course.

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