Quotes By Jean Rostand

God, that dumping ground of our dreams.

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

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

To be adult is to be alone.

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.

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

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

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

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

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

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

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

To reflect is to disturb one's thoughts.

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.

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.

Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become.

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

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

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

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

There are moments when very little truth would be enough to shape opinion. One might be hated at extremely low cost.

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

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.