"I can remember that I was asked, perhaps when I was a junior, if I would give some lectures in the evening for students who were having trouble in freshman chemistry . . . I can remember presenting chemical bond theory on the 'hook-and-eye' basis . . . [When] I ran across the papers by Langmuir which were published that year . . . I was very impressed by this work on the electronic structure of molecules or ideas about shared electron pair bonds, and it may well be that that was the start of my interest in chemical bonding."
Linus Pauling. Interview by John Heilbron, in Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, by Anthony Serafini. 1964.

"One could say that Pauling's 'failure' was to plant a lot of seeds, basic ideas, without working them out fully.... As soon as Slater gets an idea he works it out to the end before he gets a new one. But that is also dangerous, of course because you look at the trees and you don't see the forest...[Pauling] looks at the forest and lets other people...work out the specific individual things in detail; he has a terrifically lively intellect, reading [Pauling's] paper, the information here is just tremendous, the ideas flow out of the pen, and there are several lifetimes of work...to be done."
Sten Samson. Interviewed by Anthony Serafini for Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science. 1984.

"Einstein came over here and attended a scientific meeting and at the end of the meeting Pauling was to deliver a paper; Pauling was introduced and delivered a paper in flawless German! And after meeting him, Einstein congratulated him and asked him, 'Where did you learn to speak such flawless German?' And Pauling said, 'Oh, I spent a year in Germany' and Einstein said, 'You learned to speak German in a year like that? Why I've been here over two years and I can't speak English yet!'
W. K. Ferrier. Interviewed by Anthony Serafini for Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science. 1984.

Back to Quotes Index.