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Pierre Curie

by Marie Curie



Pagina 8 - February 6, 2016 [from the preface]
She will see no one. She does nothing but work.


Pagina 8 - February 6, 2016 [from the preface]
She cannot understand why scientists, rather than science, should be discussed in the press.


Pagina 10 - February 6, 2016 [from the preface]
I saw a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon.


Pagina 10 - February 6, 2016 [from the preface]
Her kind, patient, beautiful face had the detached expression of a scholar.


Pagina 19 - February 8, 2016
He neither wished nor knew how to profit by personal relations to ameliorate his condition.


Pagina 21 - February 8, 2016
Intimate contact with Nature, which, because of the artificial conditions of city life and of traditional education, few children can know, had a decisive influence on Pierre’s development. Guided by his father, he learned to observe facts and to interpret them correctly.


Pagina 24 - February 8, 2016
one cannot but be struck by the expression of the large, limpid eyes that seem to be following some inner vision


Pagina 30 - February 8, 2016
In all creative scientific work the influence of the surroundings in which one works is of great importance, and a part of the result is due to that influence.


Pagina 43 - February 8, 2016
It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing in which I hardly dare believe, to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams


Pagina 51 - February 9, 2016
When he expressed his opinion he did so frankly, for he was convinced that diplomatic methods are puerile, and that directness is at once easiest and best. Because of this practice, he acquired a certain reputation for naïveté; in reality he was acting on a well-considered decision, rather than by instinct.


Pagina 51 - February 9, 2016
if he sometimes neglected details, he was rarely deceived in the essentials


Pagina 51 - February 9, 2016
Usually he kept his sure judgments to himself; but once he had made up his mind he sometimes expressed them without reticence, in the assurance that he was doing something useful.


Pagina 51 - February 9, 2016
If his attitude was that of one of the élite who have attained the highest summit of civilization, his acts were those of a truly good man endowed with the sentiment of human solidarity intimately bound to his intellectual conceptions, and full of understanding and indulgence.


We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.


Pagina 60 - February 9, 2016
without troubling that atmosphere of peace and contemplation which is the true atmosphere of the laboratory.


Pagina 79 - February 10, 2016
He had the faith of those who open new ways.


Pagina 79 - February 10, 2016
He knew that he had a high mission to fulfil and the mystic dream of his youth pushed him invincibly beyond the usual path of life into a way which he called anti-natural because it signified the renunciation of the pleasures of life. Nevertheless, he resolutely subordinated his thoughts and desires to this dream, adapting himself to it and identifying himself with it more and more competely. Believing only in the pacific might of science and of reason, he lived for the search of truth.


Pagina 80 - February 10, 2016
science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering


Pagina 81 - February 10, 2016
the delicate charm that was exhaled, one might say, by his gentle modesty, by his naïve directness, by the fineness of his spirit.


Pagina 82 - February 10, 2016
that ideal of absolute sincerity, too high, perhaps, for the world in which we live.


Pagina 82 - February 10, 2016
It matters little in what God he believed; it is not the God, but faith, that performs miracles.


Pagina 82 - February 10, 2016
the secret of that radiation which made all those who approached him better men.


Pagina 89 - February 10, 2016 [from the second part of the book: Marie Curie's autobiographical notes]
Later I felt the need of knowing English and succeeded in acquiring the knowledge of that language and its literature.


Pagina 91 - February 10, 2016 [from the second part of the book: Marie Curie's autobiographical notes]
The scientific education I had received at the lyceum was very incomplete; it was well under the bachelorship program of a French lyceum; I tried to add to it in my own way, with the help of books picked up at random. This method could not be greatly productive, yet it was not without results. I acquired the habit of independent work, and learned a few things which were to be of use later on.


Pagina 116 - February 16, 2016 [from the second part of the book: Marie Curie's autobiographical notes]
friendly relations were established which made the later development of my work much easier.


Pagina 124 - February 24, 2016 [from the second part of the book: Marie Curie's autobiographical notes]
a manifestation organized on the 28th of April in favor of the Radium Institute of Paris by the magazine Je Sais Tout