“It may offend us to hear our own thoughts expressed by others: we are not sure enough of their souls.”
“Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.”
“I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.”
“I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.”
“The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.”
“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..”
“We are not nanve enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”