Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him.

Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist.

We would be glad to have your friend come here to study, but tell him that we teach Chemistry here and not Agricultural Chemistry, nor any other special kind of chemistry. ... We teach Chemistry.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

...even the goddess Persephone is happy, if only for half each year.

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

I'm amazed that I can still play really. But I can.

If many people love me, then I must be important.

For me this book was a very practical explanation of one man's experience of Enlightened awareness in in the face of or in light of dogma-oriented wisdom.

The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.

Laughter is very young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.