Jean Rostand Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

We are not naïve enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.

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

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Marriage simplifies life and complicates the day.

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.

To live is often to struggle toward goals one has no desire to reach.

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

In our ideals we unwittingly reveal our vices.

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.

Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.

It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.

What makes our opponents useful is that they allow us to believe that without them we would be able to realize our goals.

There are some persons we could not cut down to size without diminishing ourselves as well.

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

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

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

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