Jean Rostand Quotes

There are big and little truths, but all belong to the same race. Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth. It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths. Le biologiste passe, la grenouille reste.<br />The biologist passes, the frog remains. What scientist would not long to go on living, if only to see how the little truths he has brought to light will grow up? Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts. It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of. On tue un homme, on est un assassin. On tue des millions d'hommes, on est un conquérant. On les tue tous, on est un dieu.<br />Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god. I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books. 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. We give others praise which we ourselves don't believe, as long as they respond with praise we can believe. I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence. 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. The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God. 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.. 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. 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. 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. The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious. The ideal, without doubt, varies, but its enemies, alas, are always the same. One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void. I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan. Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness. Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become. 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. To reflect is to disturb one's thoughts. To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should. The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions. One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it. It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed.