Yoko Ono Quotes

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.

I am a mystery to myself.

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

An idea can be tested, whereas if you have no idea, nothing can be tested and you don't understand anything. The molecule that you make when you are getting sunburned or when you eat a lot of food is part of the same molecule that contains an endorphin or an opiate. No one has ever had a hypothesis about why the two are together.

I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.

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.

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

In fact, I don't even know myself. That is the big secret of the story. That there is no story.

I am a creature of chemicals.

Think about the whole world of biological complex sciences. We still don't understand the way a protein folds the way it does.

On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.

One does not know - cannot know - the best that is in one.

Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.

Death falls heavily on that man who, known too well to others, dies in ignorance of himself.

A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.

The wonderful structure of the animal system will probably never permit us to look upon it as a merely physical apparatus, yet the demands of science require that the evidently magnified principles of vitality should be reduced to their natural spheres, or if truth requires, wholly subverted in favor of those more cognizable by the human understanding. The spirit of the age will not tolerate in the devotee of science a quiet indifference.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

How little do the wisest among us know of that which is so important to us all.

Only with the ultimate knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man.

Who makes us ignorant? We ourselves. We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark.

From a chemist's point of view, the surface or interior of a star…is boring—there are no molecules there.