Chemistry Quotes - page 13
It is a pretty structure isn't it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that "beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.
Primo Levi
Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!
Primo Levi
QUESTION: A well-known saying of yours asserts that 'Every man is an artist.' If every man is an artist, then why have art academies and art professors at all?
BEUYS: To be sure, 'every man is an artist' in a general sense: one must be an artist for example, to create self-determination. But at a certain stage in his life every man becomes a specialist in a certain way; one studies chemistry, another sculpture or painting, a third becomes doctor, and so on. For this reason we understandably need special schools.
Joseph Beuys
Reader! Imagine a school-boy who has outgrown his clothes. Imagine the repairs made on the vestments where the enlarged frame had burst the narrow limits of its inclosure. Imagine the additions made where the projecting limbs had fairly and far emerged beyond the confines of the garment. Imagine the boy still growing, and the clothes, mended all over, now more than ever in want of mending - such is chemistry, and such its nomenclature.
John Joseph Griffin
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
What does cooking mean It means the knowledge of Media and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits. and balms and spices.... I means the economy of your great-grandmother and the science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that your are to see imperatively, that everyone has something nice to eat.
John Ruskin
Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.
Margaret Atwood
