Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

ou can hardly imagine how I am struggling to exert my poetical ideas just now for the discovery of analogies and remote figures respecting the earth, sun, and all sorts of things — for I think that is the true way (corrected by judgment) to work out a discovery.

In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.

It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

I think chemistry is being frittered away by the hairsplitting of the organic chemists; we have new compounds discovered, which scarcely differ from the known ones and when discovered are valueless-very illustrations perhaps of their refinements in analysis, but very little aiding the progress of true science.