Marie Curie Quotes

I met Pierre Curie for the first time in the spring of the year 1894... A Polish physicist whom I knew, and who was a great admirer of Pierre Curie, one day invited us together to spend the evening with himself and his wife.

In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.

RADIUM, n. A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a scientist is a fool with.

The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France, with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals.

It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.

We believe the substance we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal not yet observed, related to bismuth by its analytical properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed we propose to call it polonium, from the name of the original country of one of us.

Last year, I was very shocked when I went to a debate on Women's Day. They had a survey, and they were asking these girls how many women inventors we have, how many women scientists do we have. And you'd be shocked that hardly anyone knew that Ada Lovelace was there behind computer science, that Marie Curie still remains iconic with two Nobel prizes. So there's a lot of homework to do to actually make -- to remove all these gender biases at a very young age; instill that confidence in that girl; to tell her that she can do as well if not better than her brother.

In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.

My parents did give me a lot of books - biographies of Marie Curie - and I did read them, because I was interested.

We Americans are mildly interested, of course, in reading about the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, but what we really yearn to know is the name of the uncommemorated French female who first mixed a sauce bearnaise.

Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was especially popular: the 'it' element of its day. Radium glows an eerie blue-green in the dark, giving off light for years without any apparent power source. People had never seen anything like it.

I mean I certainly tell the Maria Goeppert-Mayer story and I'm happy that life isn't like that. I'm glad there were trailblazers like her and Marie Curie.

Marie Curie is in a class all her own as the first female winner and still the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different science categories. An astounding scientist.