Molecules Quotes

“The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics

“If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.”
― James Jeans, An Introduction to the Kinetic Theory of Gases

“What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.
When people die they are sometimes put into coffins which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.
But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burnt and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Every tiny molecule of Ash is in motion with my heat I am such a Lunatic that I am free even in Jail.”
― Bhagat Singh

“When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.”
― Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life

“If you could be nothing, you could also be everything. Once my molecules had dispersed, I would be here forever. Free.

Part of the timeless. The sky and the ocean would also be me.

Molecules never die, I thought.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.”
― Edwin Grant Conklin

“Leonardo believed his research had the
potential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence of
an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected… that the molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine… that there is a single force moving within all of us.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Leonardo believed his research had the
potential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence of
an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected… that
the molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine… that there is a single force
moving within all of us.” Langdon felt disconcerted. And the power of God shall unite us all. “Mr. Vetra actually found a way
to demonstrate that particles are connected?”
“Conclusive evidence. A recent Scientific American article hailed New Physics as a surer path to God
than religion itself.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Stoans want to be lissent to. Them big brown stoans in the formers feal they want to stan up and talk like men. Some times youwl see them lying on the groun with ther humps and hollers theywl say to you, Sit a wyl and res easy why dont you. Then when youre sitting on them theywl talk and theywl tel if you lissen. Theywl tel whats in them but you wont hear nothing what theyre saying without you go as fas as the stoan. You myt think a stoan is slow thats becaws you wont see it moving. Wont see it walking a roun. That dont mean its slow tho. There are the many cools of Addom which they are the party cools of stoan. Moving in ther millyings which is the girt dants of the every thing its the fastes thing there is it keaps the stilness going. Reason you wont see it move its so far a way in to the stoan. If you cud fly way way up like a saddelite bird over the sea and you lookit down you wunt see the waves moving youwd see them change 1 way to a nother only you wunt see them moving youwd be too far a way. You wunt see nothing only a changing stilness. Its the same with a stoan.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“I was led to the conclusion that at the most extreme dilutions all salts would consist of simple conducting molecules. But the conducting molecules are, according to the hypothesis of Clausius and Williamson, dissociated; hence at extreme dilutions all salt molecules are completely disassociated. The degree of dissociation can be simply found on this assumption by taking the ratio of the molecular conductivity of the solution in question to the molecular conductivity at the most extreme dilution.”
― Svante Arrhenius

“The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of the internal architecture of molecules. A series of experiments directed toward such a goal is the object of this paper.”
― Wilhelm Korner

“[S]uppose you make a hole in an ordinary evacuated electric light bulb and allow the air molecules to pass in at the rate of 1,000,000 a second, the bulb will become full of air in approximately 100,000,000 years.”
― Francis William Aston

“It would appear that the blue sky is actually produced by the solar wind and solar radiation exciting air molecules to emit light, just like a neon lamp!”
― Steven Magee, Light Forensics

“three tiers to the heart: physical, ethereal, Eternal
with each one being more spiritual and subtle
the physical heart a little brain with over 40,000 neurons
it sends and receives by electromagnetic field operations
it's got its own nervous system that senses and remembers
making decisions and giving directions to other centers
emitting enfolded energetic organizational patterns
information, that is—communicative interactions
detected outside the body by magnetometers and other people
for heart coherence listen to Pärt's “Spiegel im Spiegel”
valid are chakras and acupuncture meridians
meditate on the heart chakra to see what this means
energy meridians are strings of polarized crystalline water
bioelectric signals transmitted in connective tissue matter
information is sent along these lengths of collagen proteins
molecules of structured water allowing the transfer of protons
crystal water wires inside protein pathways
with acupuncture points being junctures in the maze
the protons, then, are what have been referred to as “chi”
a current flowing, much like electrical circuitry”
― Jarett Sabirsh, Love All-Knowing: An Epic Spiritual Poem

“I watch my classmates spilling out of school, in groups of two or three, their formations intimidatingly organic.
Atoms into molecules. Like usual, I am alone.”
― Julie Buxbaum, What to Say Next

“Perhaps the most impressive illustration of all is to suppose that you could label the molecules in a tumbler of water. ... threw it anywhere you please on the earth, and went away from the earth for a few million years while all the water on the earth, the oceans, rivers, lakes and clouds had had time to mix up perfectly. Now supposing that perfect mixing had taken place, you come back to earth and draw a similar tumbler of water from the nearest tap, how many of those marked molecules would you expect to find in it? Well, the answer is 2000. There are 2000 times more molecules in a tumbler of water than there are tumblers of water in the whole earth.”
― Francis William Aston

“It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“Cells became molecules—countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“Fitting into the equation of humanity, we knead the poignancy of compassion and milk the headiness of creativity into ever more substantive knowing, pushing the collective, universal consciousness to expand moment by moment, molecule by molecule.”
― Laurie Perez, The Power of Amie Martine

“A puzzle that remains in the field of allostery in this high-throughput era is that we have had very limited tools that allow us to answer the general question of which proteins in the proteome are allosteric and who their binding partners are. Despite Monod's characterization of the allostery phenomenon as the second secret of life, because of this important knowledge gap, as a field we are often flying blind because of our ignorance of how the key molecular players in the signaling pathways have their activity modified by other chemical agents, and because of our ignorance of the identity of those chemical agents themselves.

To that end, the emergence of mass spectrometry has provided an exciting opportunity to query not only the posttranslational modifications suffered by a given signaling molecule but also, because of recent innovations, when signaling molecules have bound a given small molecule. We see that by lysing cells in the absence and in the presence of some small-molecule allosteric effector candidate, some proteins will bind that small molecule and, as a result, be resistant to limited proteolysis by proteinase K. This means that when the proteins are denatured and trypsin digested, the pattern of cuts in the polypeptide chain will be different for any protein that was bound to the candidate small molecule. Approaches such as this hold the promise of systematic identification of the allosterome for any organism and will be a critical part of our resolution of the puzzles of how the macromolecules of the cell are controlled by a battery of small molecules.”
― Rob Phillips, The Molecular Switch: Signaling and Allostery