Peter Atkins Quotes

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don't matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.

A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming around the countryside ... Some of the things resembling elephants will be men.

All change...arises from an underlying collapse into chaos...what may appear to us to be motive and purpose is in fact ultimately motiveless, purposeless decay.

Any argument that asserts that 'God did it' is a sign of a lazy mind.

Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation..

Science is almost totally incompatible with religion.

Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.

Chemistry begins in the stars. The stars are the source of the chemical elements, which are the building blocks of matter and the core of our subject.

My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations.

[Religion is] a fantasy [and is] completely empty of any explanatory content. It is also evil.

Theologians could not even agree about the nature of their gods. These personages ranged from "blue touch-paper gods" who started everything and never interfered again, to "infinitely meddlesome gods who, as well as starting it off, police every elementary particle.

The emergence of consciousness, like the unfolding of a leaf, relies upon restraint.

If the elements are the alphabets of chemistry, then the compounds are its plays, its poems, and its novels.

It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.