Marie Curie Quotes

“Ours is a perfect world--but perfection does not linger in one place. It is a firefly, by its very nature elusive and unpredictable.”
― Neal Shusterman, Thunderhead

“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.”
― Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words

“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, Views From a Height: A Brilliant Overview of the Exciting Realms of Science

“Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life—this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.”
― Irène Joliot-Curie

“At my urgent request the Curie laboratory, in which radium was discovered a short time ago, was shown to me. The Curies themselves were away travelling. It was a cross between a stable and a potato-cellar, and, if I had not seen the worktable with the chemical apparatus, I would have thought it a practical joke.

(Wilhelm Ostwald on seeing the Curie's laboratory facilities.)”
― Wilhelm, Ostwald

“I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies...”
― Ernest Rutherford

“[…] Miffed at their holiday, Mrs. Langevin sent Paul and Marie’s love letters to a scurrilous newspaper, which published all the juicy bits. A humiliated Langevin ended up fighting pistol duels to salvage Curie’s honor, though no one was shot. The only casualty resulted when Mrs. Langevin KO’d Paul with a chair.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“High altitude illness and disease research is where radiation health research was during the time of Marie Curie.”
― Steven Magee

“My little brother-in-law had the habit of disturbing me endlessly. He absolutely could not endure having me do anything but engage in agreeable chatter with him when I was at home. I had to declare war on him on this subject”
― Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science