Mendeleev Quotes

“For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]”
― C.P. Snow, The Search

“Like his Russian contemporary Dostoevsky — who wrote his entire novel ‘The Gambler’ in three weeks to pay off desperate gambling debts — Mendeleev threw together his first table to meet a textbook publisher’s deadline.”
― 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

“The second number goes off like a top - so fast indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights go up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws working convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their ear Brahms, Beethoven, Mendeleev, Herzegovina, they would answer without thinking - 4, 967, 289.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer