The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

I have always wanted to know as much as possible about the world.

By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.

There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine.

I try to identify myself with the atoms ... I ask what I would do If I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom.

It was obvious-to me at any rate-that the answer was to why an enzyme is able to speed up a chemical reaction by as much as 10 million times. It had to do this by lowering the energy of activation-the energy of forming the activated complex. It could do this by forming strong bonds with the activated complex, but only weak bonds with the reactants or products.