Jean Rostand Quotes

Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

We spend our time envying people whom we wouldn't wish to be.

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.

Kill one man, and you are murderer.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

To be adult is to be alone.

A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

When I was young I pitied the old. Now old, it is the young I pity.

The ideal, without doubt, varies, but its enemies, alas, are always the same.

The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions.

One kills a man, one is an assassin; one kills millions, one is a conqueror; one kills everybody, one is a god.

Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill a million and you're a conqueror.

Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.

I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Falsity cannot keep an idea from being beautiful; there are certain errors of such ingenuity that one could regret their not ranking among the achievements of the human mind.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she has thought much worse things about you.

Hatred, for the man who is not engaged in it, is a little like the odor of garlic for one who hasn't eaten any.

We must watch over our modesty in the presence of those who cannot understand its grounds.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

We give others praise which we ourselves don't believe, as long as they respond with praise we can believe.

Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness.

We find it easy to believe that praise is sincere: why should anyone lie in telling us the truth?

On the brink of being satiated, desire still appears infinite.

A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.

Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.

Being right is less important to us than the freedom to be wrong.

I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.

Renown? I've already got more of it than those I respect, and will never have as much as those for whom I feel contempt.

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths.

The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.

To reflect is to disturb one's thoughts.

To be able to observe with a stranger's eye helps one to see with an artist's eye. What alienates us inspires.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

To say of men that they are bad is to say they are worse than we think we are, or worse than the ideal man whose image we have built up on the basis of a certain few.

It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed.

I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.