If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every …

- William Crookes

The rare earth elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown se…

- William Crookes

Chemists do not usually stutter. It would be very awkward if they did, seeing that they have at times to get out such words as methylethylamylophenyl…

- William Crookes

Probably our atomic weights merely represent a mean value around which the actual atomic weights of the atoms vary within certain narrow limits... wh…

- William Crookes

...Nature-the word that stands for the baffling mysteries of the Universe. Steadily, unflinchingly, we strive to pierce the inmost heart of Nature, f…

- William Crookes

It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion.

- William Crookes

Most students of nature sooner or later pass through a process of writing off a large percentage of their supposed capital of knowledge as a merely i…

- William Crookes

Probably if half a kilogram [of radium] were in a bottle on that table it would kill us all. It would almost certainly destroy our sight and burn our…

- William Crookes

To stop short in any research that bids fair to widen the gates of knowledge, to recoil from fear of difficulty or adverse criticism, is to bring rep…

- William Crookes