What makes Curie's remark so bracing is that she refuses the false choice between beauty and rigor—the idea that science must be austere to be serious. She's telling us that the elegance of a well-designed experiment, the symmetry of mathematical truth, the way nature arranges itself around fundamental laws, these things satisfy something deeper than mere curiosity. A teenager struggling through physics problems might despair that the subject is all drudgery until a teacher draws the connection between a pendulum's swing and the orbits of planets, suddenly revealing the hidden grace in equations. Curie invites us to see her work not as tedious measurement and repetition, but as an act of aesthetic appreciation—one that happened to advance human knowledge.