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Max Perutz Quotes

What is known for certain is dull.

What is known for certain is dull.

Max Perutz
Knowledge, Science, Dull
"I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier". Book by Igor F. Tsigelny, p. 314, 1998.

Discoveries cannot be planned, they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners

Max Perutz
Discovery, Puck, Unexpected

I rarely plan my research; it plans me.

Max Perutz
Science, Research, Plans

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.

Max Perutz
Falling In Love, Nature, Science

People are best judged by their actions

Max Perutz
People, Action, Judged

For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures.

Max Perutz
Girl, Book, Science

Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?

Max Perutz
Visceral, Ultimate Truth, Hideous
"The Hemoglobin Molecule". Scientific American, 211, 65-76, November 1964.

Scientists like myself merely use their gifts to show up that which already exists, and we look small compared to the artists who create works of beauty out of themselves. If a good fairy came and offered me back my youth, asking me which gifts I would rather have, those to make visible a thing which exists but which no man has ever seen before, or the genius needed to create, in a style of architecture never imagined before, the great Town Hall in which we are dining tonight, I might be tempted to choose the latter.

Max Perutz
Science, Artist, Men

Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.

Max Perutz
Success, Science, Technology
"The Impact of Science on Society: The Challenge for Education". "Science and Technology and Future Human Needs" by J. L. Lewis and P. J. Kelly, 1987.

On hearing the news [of being awarded a Nobel Prize], a friend who knows me only too well, sent me this laconic message: 'Blood, toil, sweat and tears always were a good mixture'.

Max Perutz
Blood, Sweat, Tears

I saw Linus Pauling as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

Max Perutz
Memories, Greatness, Men

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