All Quotes

"À mesure que la faveur et les grands biens se retirent d'un homme, ils laissent voir en lui le ridicule qu'ils couvraient, et qui y était sans que personne s'en aperçût."

"N'envions point à une sorte de gens leurs grandes richesses; ils les ont à titre onéreux, et qui ne nous accommoderait point: ils ont mis leur repos, leur santé, leur honneur et leur conscience pour les avoir; cela est trop cher, et il n'y a rien à gagner à un tel marché."

"Rien ne fait mieux comprendre le peu de chose que Dieu croit donner aux hommes, en leur abandonnant les richesses, l'argent, les grands établissements et les autres biens, que la dispensation qu'il en fait, et le genre d'hommes qui en sont le mieux pourvus."

"S'il est vrai que l'on soit pauvre par toutes les choses que l'on désire, l'ambitieux et l'avare languissent dans une extrême pauvreté."

"Il n'y a au monde que deux manières de s'élever, ou par sa propre industrie, ou par l'imbécillité des autres."

"Il y a des âmes sales, pétries de boue et d’ordure, éprises du gain et de l’intérêt, comme les belles âmes le sont de la gloire et de la vertu; capables d’une seule volupté, qui est celle d’acquérir ou de ne point perdre."

"La ville est partagée en diverses sociétés, qui sont comme autant de petites républiques, qui ont leurs lois, leurs usages, leur jargon, et leurs mots pour rire. Tant que cet assemblage est dans sa force, et que l'entêtement subsiste, l'on ne trouve rien de bien dit ou de bien fait que ce qui part des siens, et l'on est incapable de goûter ce qui vient d'ailleurs: cela va jusques au mépris pour les gens qui ne sont pas initiés dans leurs mystères."

"[L]e plus fort et le plus pénible est de donner; que coûte-t-il d'y ajouter un sourire?"

"L'on doit se taire sur les puissants: il y a presque toujours de la flatterie à en dire du bien; il y a du péril à en dire du mal pendant qu'ils vivent, et de la lâcheté quand ils sont morts."

"Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir. Il ne se sent pas naître, il souffre à mourir, et il oublie de vivre."

"Ainsi les postes éminents rendent les grands hommes encore plus grands, et les petits beaucoup plus petits."

"La plupart des hommes emploient la meilleure partie de leur vie à rendre l'autre misérable."

"Most men make use of the first part of their life to render the last part miserable."

"L'une des marques de la médiocrité de l'esprit est de toujours conter."

"One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories."

"Entre le bon sens et le bon goût il y a la différence de la cause à son effet."

"Quel avantage n'a pas un discours prononcé sur un ouvrage qui est écrit! Les hommes sont les dupes de l'action et de la parole, comme de tout l'appareil de l'auditoire. Pour peu de prévention qu'ils aient en faveur de celui qui parle, ils l'admirent, et cherchent ensuite à le comprendre: avant qu'il ait commencé, ils s'écrient qu'il va bien faire; ils s'endorment bientôt, et le discours fini, ils se réveillent pour dire qu'il a bien fait. On se passionne moins pour un auteur: son ouvrage est lu dans le loisir de la campagne, ou dans le silence du cabinet; il n'y a point de rendez-vous publics pour lui applaudir. ... On lit son livre, quelque excellent qu'il soit, dans l'esprit de le trouver médiocre; on le feuillette, on le discute, on le confronte; ce ne sont pas des sons qui se perdent en l'air et qui s'oublient; ce qui est imprimé demeure imprimé."

"La Bruyère is not a speculative moralist, but an observer of the manners of men, or, as he likes to call himself, a philosopher, and above all a Christian philosopher."

"Shortly afterwards the public lost a writer of genius renowned for his style and knowledge of humanity. I speak of La Bruyère, who died of apoplexy at Versailles, after excelling Theophrastes in his own manner, by portraying quite inimitably the men of our time in his Charactèrs. He was a very decent sort of man and excellent company, simple, not at all the pedant, and wholly sincere. I knew him well enough to regret both his death and the books which his age and health had led one to expect from him."

"The Characters of La Bruyère may be regarded as a production of a unique kind. No examples of such a work are to be found in the classics any more than of Télèmaque. The public were struck by a style at once rapid, terse and vigorous, by picturesque expressions, in a word, by a totally new use of the language which did not, however, break its rules; and the numerous allusions contained in the work crowned its success. When La Bruyère showed the manuscript of his work to M. de Malezieu, the latter said to him: "Here is something which will bring you many readers and many enemies." When the generation that was attacked in this book had passed away, its reputation declined. Nevertheless, as there are some books which belong to all time and to all countries, it is probable that it will never be forgotten."

"So, what is quantum mechanics? Even though it was discovered by physicists, it’s not a physical theory in the same sense as electromagnetism or general relativity. In the usual “hierarchy of sciences” – with biology at the top, then chemistry, then physics, then math – quantum mechanics sits at a level between math and physics that I don’t know a good name for. Basically, quantum mechanics is the operating system that other physical theories run on as application software (with the exception of general relativity, which hasn’t yet been successfully ported to this particular OS). There’s even a word for taking a physical theory and porting it to this OS: “to quantize.”"

"We cannot make apparatuses arbitrarily big. ... We might need some extension of quantum mechanics."

"Christian Imbert, to support my project and to act as my thesis advisor. He had advised me to go first to Geneva, to discuss my proposal with John Bell. I got an appointment without delay, and I showed up in John's office at CERN, quite nervous. While I explained my planned experiment, he listened silently. Eventually, I stopped talking, and the first question came: "Have you a permanent position?" After my positive answer, he started talking of physics, and he definitely encouraged me, making it clear that he would consider the implementation of variable analysers a fundamental improvement. Remembering this first question reminds me both of his celebrated sense of humour and of the general atmosphere at that time about raising questions on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Quite frequently there was open hostility, and in the best case, irony: "quantum mechanics has been vindicated by such a large amount of work by the smartest theorists and experimentalists; how can you hope to find anything with such a simple scheme, in optics, a science of the 19th century?" In addition to starting the experiment, I had then to develop a line of argument to try to convince the physicists I met (and among them some had to give their opinion about funding my project)."

"Quantum mechanics was, and continues to be, revolutionary, primarily because it demands the introduction of radically new concepts to better describe the world. In addition we have argued that conceptual quantum revolutions in turn enable technological quantum revolutions."

"No other theory of the physical world has caused such consternation as quantum theory, for no other theory has so completely overthrown the previously cherished concepts of classical physics and our everyday apprehension of reality. For philosophers, it has been a romping ground of epistemological adventure of pessimism about science's ability to expose ultimate truth. For physicists, it has required a confrontation with the nature of physical reality and a heady inhalation of new attitudes. For all scientists and technologists, it has been the key to advances in all fields of endeavor, from genetics to superconductivity. The extraordinary feature of quantum theory is that although we do not understand it, we can apply the rules of calculation it inspires, and compute properties of matter to unparalleled accuracy, in some cases with a precision that exceeds that currently obtained from experiment."

"… that what is proved, by impossibility proofs, is lack of imagination."

"I am a Quantum Engineer, but on Sundays I Have Principles."

"Quantum mechanics had never been wrong. And now we know that it will not be wrong even in these very tricky conditions."

"I'm quite convinced of that: quantum theory is only a temporary expedient."

"This particular question of locality is still open, in my opinion. I think we have not found a way of digesting this situation. I think we have not found a way of digesting this situation. We have the formulas of quantum mechanics, and they work extremely well; but I have not digested them. There certainly remains something to be said, some illumination to be found."

"I hesitated to think it might be wrong, but I knew that it was rotten. That is to say, one has to find some decent way of expressing whatever truth there is in it."

"The entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealisations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description. This means that the view of the world being analogous to a huge machine, the predominant view from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is now shown to be only approximately correct. The underlying structure of matter, however, is not mechanical. This means that the term "quantum mechanics" is very much a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called "quantum nonmechanics"."

"For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."

"And all at once I lost my breath And all at once was scared to death For all at once I owned the earth and sky. Now I've met Miss Jones We'll keep on meeting till we die, Yes, Miss Jones and I."

"God made Man, but he used a monkey to do it."

"Are we not men? We are DEVO!"

"Take a step outside yourself / Then you turn around / Take a look at who you are / It's pretty scary."

"It's not nuclear bombs we must fear but the human mind itself (or lack of it) on this planet."

"Lies, lies, lies. That's all we get from those who pretend to know but don't!"

"But once again DEVO attempts to cut through the mental grease and grime with techniques of positive mutation designed to protect you from the ninnies and the twits."

"It's time to seek out new traditions."

"This is the boy who burns the books / This is the way he always looks / This is the boy who smashed his car / This is the boy who went too far / Washed his eyes with yellow soap / He stole his daddy's microscope."

"Big people set the trap for you / Using you-know-what for brains / You're just another lab experiment / And you're easy to replace."

"Got an urge i wanna purge / 'Cause i'm losing control."

"Something about the way you taste / Makes me want to clear my throat."

"I got my head down to my lungs and move my feet."

"They say the fittest shall survive / Yet the unfit may live / Wear gaudy colors or avoid display / Hey it don't matter / It's all the same."

"Guess i'm just a spudboy / Looking for that real tomato."

"She sends out an aroma of undefined love / It drips on down in a mist from above."

"A victim of collision on the open sea / Nobody ever said that life was free."