May 15 1859 - April 19 1906. French physicist and physical chemist, an early researcher of radioactivity, fellow of the French Academy of Sciences, winner of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. Credited with the discovery of radium and polonium together with his wife, Marie Skłodowska-Curie.
Quotes:
1. I firmly believe that science and peace will prevail over ignorance and war.
2. A scientist has no right to depart from science.
3. I personally belong to people thinking like Nobel, namely that mankind will derive more good than harm from the new discoveries.
4. Whatever happens, even if the soul were about to bid farewell to the body, you still have to work.
5. However little was achieved, it is still an accomplishment.
6. Undoubtedly, so far I have been unable to found a means of protecting against the theft of our time, but such protection is absolutely necessary. It’s a matter of life or death for one’s intelligence.
7. I'm not strong enough to get angry.
8. We still have to eat, drink, sleep, loiter, love, that is, touch the most pleasant things in this life and yet not succumb to them. But as we do all this, we must make sure that... thoughts to which we devote ourselves remain dominant in us and continue their unperturbed motion in our unhappy heads: we must make a dream out of life, and make reality out of dreams.
9. The heaviest burden is the concessions we have to make to the prejudices of the society around us, whether large or small, depending on the greater or lesser force of ourselves.
10. For me, a weak man, to avoid letting my head wander at the will of the slightest headwind, I need the surrounding settings to be fully fixed, or I’ll have to run like a spinning top so that the motion itself will make me immune to the surrounding things.
