About Jean Rostand: Jean Rostand was a French biologist and philosopher.
To be adult is to be alone.
Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
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.
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. Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.
There are moments when very little truth would be enough to shape opinion. One might be hated at extremely low cost.
Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
God, that dumping ground of our dreams.
Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.
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.
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.
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.
There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.
One kills a man, one is an assassin; one kills millions, one is a conqueror; one kills everybody, one is a god.
The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.
I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.
To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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.
Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.
