“Radium is not to enrich any one. It is an element; it is for all people.”

I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.

It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.

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.

You will find that one special love that you know is right but for some reason just doesn’t last.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals.

Life is not easy for any for us.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty.

It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child.

More and more, I feel the need for a house and a garden.

All that I saw and learned was a new delight to me.

The older one gets, the more one feels that the present moment must be enjoyed, comparable to a state of grace.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals.

A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.

Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

I always knew I would be successful. So there was no element of surprise.

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.