1.
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
2.
What is known for certain is dull.
Max Perutz
3.
Discoveries cannot be planned, they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners
Max Perutz
4.
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
5.
Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?
Max Perutz
6.
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
7.
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
8.
I rarely plan my research; it plans me.
Max Perutz
9.
People are best judged by their actions
Max Perutz
10.
Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.
Max Perutz
11.
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
