"Curie brought to his study of physical phenomena I do not know what very fine sense which made him divine unsuspected analogies, and made it possible for him to orient himself in a labyrinth of complex appearances where others would have gone astray.... True physicists, like Curie, neither look within themselves, nor on the surface of things, but they know how to look through things.
"All those who knew him knew their pleasure and surety in his acquaintance, and the delicate charm that was exhaled, one might say, by his gentle modesty, by his naïve directness, by the fineness of his spirit. Always ready to efface himself before his family, before his friends, and even before his rivals, he was what one calls a 'poor candidate'; but in our democracy candidates are the least thing we lack.
"Who would have thought that so much gentleness concealed an intransigeant soul? He did not compromise with those general principles on which he was nourished, nor with the particular moral ideal he had been taught to love, that ideal of absolute sincerity, too high, perhaps, for the world in which we live. He did not know the thousand little accommodations with which our weakness contents itself. Moreover, he never separated the worship of this ideal from what he rendered to science, and he gave us a shining example of the high conception of duty that may spring from a simple and pure love of truth. It matters little in what God he believed; it is not the God, but faith, that performs miracles."
Institut de France: Written about P. Curie by M. D. Gernez.
"All for work, all for science: this sums up the life of Pierre Curie, a life so rich in brilliant discoveries and in the outlook of genius that it won him practically universal admiration. In the full maturity of his investigations whose progress he so eagerly pursued his work was ended, to the consternation of us all, by a terrible catastrophe on the 19th of April, 1906....
"All these honors did not dazzle him; he was and he will remain a remarkable figure among those who make the scientific history of our epoch. His contemporaries found in him a precious example of a devotion to science at once unyielding and disinterested. There have been few lives more pure and more justly famous."
Jean Perrin:
"Pierre Curie, whom all called a master, and whom we had the joy to call, too, our friend, died suddenly in the fullness of his powers.... We will try to show through him, as an example, what part a powerful genius can return to sincerity, to liberty, to the strong and calm audacity of thought which nothing can enchain and nothing can astonish. We acknowledge also all the greatness of the soul where these fine qualities of intelligence and character were united in a most noble unselfishness and most exquisite goodness.
"Those who have known Pierre Curie, know that, near him one felt awaken the need to do and to understand. We will try to honor his memory by spreading abroad this impression, and we will ask his pale and beautiful face for the secret of that radiation which made all those who approached him better men."
C. Cheneveau: