Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Marie CurieRead
I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times, I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success; at others, I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Success and failure are part of the experimental process in science.
Marie Curie's quote highlights the unpredictable nature of scientific experimentation, where unexpected results can bring both joy and disappointment. It emphasizes that progress often comes through a combination of successes and failures, shaped by one's learning journey and experiences in the field of science.
Themes
ExperimentationScienceSuccessFailureLearning
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a science classroom to encourage students to embrace failure as part of learning.
More from Marie Curie
All quotes →I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery has its own beauty.
Marie CurieRead
The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy... luminous energy.
Marie CurieRead
During the year 1894, Pierre Curie wrote me letters that seem to me admirable in their form. No one of them was very long, for he had the habit of concise expression, but all were written in a spirit of sincerity and with an evident anxiety to make the one he desired as a companion know him as he was.
Marie CurieRead
Certein bodies... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.
Marie CurieRead
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.
Marie CurieRead
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