“If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?”

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon’s time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

Mathematical Analysis is… the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

The dead govern the living.

Woman is the most moral element in all humanity.

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Know yourself to improve yourself.

Everything is relative; and only that is absolute.

The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions-each branch of our knowledge-passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious: the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.

The second I met Zac, I thought he was a really cool guy. It’s hard not to have chemistry with someone who is so attractive.

Every aspect of the world today – even politics and international relations – is affected by chemistry.

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

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.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

Like thousands of other boys, I had a little chemical laboratory in our cellar and think that some of our friends thought me a bit crazy.

The whole art of making experiments in chemistry is founded on the principle: we must always suppose an exact equality or equation between the principles of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis.

Perhaps; some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.