Marie Curie Quotes

140 Marie Curie Quotes

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Life is not easy for any of us. But so what? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted with something and that this thing must be achieved.
Marie Curie

We have no money, no laboratory and no help in the conduct of this important and difficult task. It was like creating something out of nothing.
Marie Curie

I shall give you back your motor car after the war. Truthfully, if it’s not useless by then, I shall give it back to you!
Marie Curie

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

Each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Marie Curie

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie

It is important to make a dream of life and of a dream reality.
Marie Curie

A great discovery does not issue from a scientists brain ready-made, like Minerva springing fully armed from Jupiter’s head; it is the fruit of an accumulation of preliminary work.
Marie Curie

I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark, so I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.
Marie Curie

First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or events.
Marie Curie



[On her youngest daughter Eve becoming a fashionable beauty] What sort of new style is this… miles and miles of naked back! You run the risk of pleurisy [cough/inflammation of the lungs].
Marie Curie

You’ll never make me believe women were made to walk on stilts.
Marie Curie

My father had no laboratory and could not perform experiments.
Marie Curie

There is nothing more wonderful than being a scientist, nowhere I would rather be than in my lab, staining up my clothes and getting paid to play.
Marie Curie

There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.
Marie Curie

I have been frequently questioned, especially by women, how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.
Marie Curie

[On Radium] The fact is very remarkable, and leads to the belief that these minerals may contain an element which is much more active than uranium.
Marie Curie

We thus believe that the substance that we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal never known before, akin to bismuth in its analytic properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we suggest that it should be called polonium after the name of the country of origin of one of us.
Marie Curie

The private schools directed by Poles were closely watched by the police and overburdened with the necessity of teaching the Russian language even to children so young that they could scarcely speak their native Polish.
Marie Curie

Men of moral and intellectual distinction could scarcely agree to teach in schools where an alien attitude was forced upon them.
Marie Curie



This abnormal situation resulted in exciting the patriotic feeling of Polish youths to the highest degree.
Marie Curie

I was only fifteen when I finished my high-school studies, always having held first rank in my class. The fatigue of growth and study compelled me to take almost a year’s rest in the country.
Marie Curie

After the railway journey I must drive for five hours longer. What experience was awaiting me? So I questioned as I sat close to the car window looking out across the wide plains.
Marie Curie

I continued my efforts to educate myself. This was no easy task under the Russian government of Warsaw; yet I found more opportunities than in the country.
Marie Curie

At times I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success, at others I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience. But on the whole, though I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy, this first trial confirmed in me the taste for experimental research in the fields of physics and chemistry.
Marie Curie

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Marie Curie

The room I lived in was in a garret, very cold in winter, for it was insufficiently heated by a small stove which often lacked coal. During a particularly rigorous winter, it was not unusual for the water to freeze in the basin in the night; to be able to sleep I was obliged to pile all my clothes on the bedcovers. In the same room I prepared my meals with the aid of an alcohol lamp and a few kitchen utensils. These meals were often reduced to bread with a cup of chocolate, eggs or fruit. I had no help in housekeeping and I myself carried the little coal I used up the six flights.
Marie Curie

This life, painful from certain points of view, had, for all that, a real charm for me. It gave me a very precious sense of liberty and independence.
Marie Curie

I had not succeeded in acquiring in Poland a preparation as complete as that of the French students following the same course. So I was obliged to supply this deficiency, especially in mathematics.
Marie Curie

All that I saw and learned that was new delighted me. It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.
Marie Curie



Having grown up in an atmosphere of patriotism kept alive by the oppression of Poland, I wished, like many other young people of my country, to contribute my effort toward the conservation of our national spirit....
Marie Curie

One can understand, from this letter, that for Pierre Curie there was only one way of looking at the future. He had dedicated his life to his dream of science: he felt the need of a companion who could live his dream with him.
Marie Curie

It became a serious problem how to take care of our little Irène and of our home without giving up my scientific work. Such a renunciation would have been very painful to me, and my husband would not even think of it; he used to say that he had got a wife made expressly for him to share all his preoccupations. Neither of us would contemplate abandoning what was so precious to both.
Marie Curie

It can be easily understood that there was no place in our life for worldly relations.
Marie Curie

It was under this mode of quiet living, organized according to our desires, that we achieved the great work of our lives, work begun about the end of 1897 and lasting for many years.
Marie Curie

During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals. Certain ones proved radioactive; these were those containing uranium and thorium; but their radioactivity seemed abnormal, for it was much greater than the amount I had found in uranium and thorium had led me to expect.
Marie Curie

The result of our experiment proved that there were in reality new radioactive elements in pitchblende, but that their proportion did not reach even a millionth per cent!
Marie Curie

The School of Physics could give us no suitable premises, but for lack of anything better, the Director permitted us to use an abandoned shed which had been in service as a dissecting room of the School of Medicine. Its glass roof did not afford complete shelter against rain; the heat was suffocating in summer, and the bitter cold of winter was only a little lessened by the iron stove, except in its immediate vicinity. There was no question of obtaining the needed proper apparatus in common use by chemists. We simply had some old pine-wood tables with furnaces and gas burners. We had to use the adjoining yard for those of our chemical operations that involved producing irritating gases; even then the gas often filled our shed. With this equipment we entered on our exhausting work. Yet it was in this miserable old shed that we passed the best and happiest years of our life, devoting our entire days to our work.
Marie Curie

Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself.
Marie Curie

I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress with the confident hope of still better results. The feeling of discouragement that sometimes came after some unsuccessful toil did not last long and gave way to renewed activity. We had happy moments devoted to a quiet discussion of our work, walking around our shed.
Marie Curie



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