Catholics From France

"If we do not succeed with political union...then the historic decline of Europe which began with the First World War will resume."

"It is not sufficient to have a strong economy to influence events. You also have to political and military power. ... A community limited to a big market refusing to resume its responsibilities and ambitions in the world will not be peaceful, will not be able to assure its children that they will live in security. [If Europe is to have political personality it would have to have] a common foreign policy in certain domains and military co-operation that will lead, before 1995, to the creation of a multilateral rapid intervention force."

"The social and human balance of our societies depend on the farming world."

"The Americans should stop insulting us, I'm not going to be an accomplice to the depopulation of the land. It's not up to the Americans to tell us how to organise our farm policy and the balance of our society. Their attitude is to treat the EC as if it had the plague and then encourage the rest of the world to join in."

"My objective is that before the end of the millennium Europe should have a true federation. The Commission should become a political executive which can define essential common interests...responsible before the European Parliament and before the nation-states represented how you will, by the European Council or by a second chamber of national parliaments."

"[A] living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine."

"We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them."

"Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown."

"A modern poet has characterized the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I: Science is We."

"If I had to define life in a word, it would be: Life is creation."

"Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride."

"True science teaches us to doubt and to abstain from ignorance."

"Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and sole happiness.… [A] man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science."

"Our language, in fact, is only approximate, and even in science it is so indefinite that if we lose sight of phenomena and cling to words, we are speedily outside of reality.… [W]e must always cling to phenomena and see in words only expressions empty of meaning, if the phenomena they represent are not definite, or if they are absent."

"[T]heories are only hypotheses, verified by more or less numerous facts. Those verified by the most facts are the best; but even then they are never final, never to be absolutely believed."

"When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted."

"A great surgeon performs operations for stone by a single method; later he makes a statistical summary of deaths and recoveries, and he concludes from these statistics that the mortality law for this operation is two out of five. Well, I say that this ratio means literally nothing scientifically and gives us no certainty in performing the next operation; for we do not know whether the next case will be among the recoveries or the deaths. What really should be done, instead of gathering facts empirically, is to study them more accurately, each in its special determinism. We must study cases of death with great care and try to discover in them the cause of mortal accidents so as to master the cause and avoid the accidents."

"[P]articular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science."

"[S]cience, in humbling our pride, proportionately increases our power."

"Indeed, proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that, when this condition is removed, the phenomenon will no longer appear."

"[I]t is important to determine at what point to apply doubt, so as to distinguish it from scepticism, and to show how scientific doubt becomes an element of the greatest certainty. The sceptic disbelieves in science and believes in himself; he believes enough in himself to dare deny science and to assert that it is not subject to definite, fixed laws. The doubter is a true man of science; he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science; in the experimental sciences, he even accepts a criterion of absolute scientific principle."

"A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,—"Art is myself, science is ourselves.""

"[T]he experimental method draws from within itself an impersonal authority which dominates science. It forces this authority even on great men.[…] Every period has its own sum total of errors and of truths. Certain mistakes are, in a sense, inherent in their period, so that only the subsequent progress of science can reveal them.… [T]he further science advances, the more it takes an impersonal form and detaches itself from the past."

"[T]hey make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it, and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat."

"Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations."

"In sciences of observation, man observes and reasons experimentally, but he does not experiment; and in this sense we might say that a science of observation is a passive science. In sciences of experimentation, man observes, but in addition he acts on matter, analyzes its properties and to his own advantage brings about the appearance of phenomena which doubtless always occur according to natural laws, but in conditions which nature often has not yet achieved. With the help of these active experimental sciences, man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation: and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress in the experimental sciences."

"[T]he science of life […] is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen."

"Considered in itself, the experimental method is nothing but reasoning by whose help we methodically submit our ideas to experience,—the experience of facts."

"The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion."

"All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment."

"The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them."

"Science admits no exceptions; otherwise there would be no determinism in science, or rather, there would be no science."

"Science does not permit exceptions."

"Let evil swiftly befall those who have wrongly condemned us - God will avenge us."

"Quar nous navons volu ne volons le Temple mettre en aucune servitute se non tant come il hy affiert."

"It is just that, in so terrible a day, and in the last moments of my life, I should discover all the iniquity of falsehood, and make the truth triumph. I declare, then, in the face of heaven and earth, and acknowledge, though to my eternal shame, that I have committed the greatest crimes but it has been the acknowledging of those which have been so foully charged on the order. I attest - and truth obliges me to attest - that it is innocent! I made the contrary declaration only to suspend the excessive pains of torture, and to mollify those who made me endure them. I know the punishments which have been inflicted on all the knights who had the courage to revoke a similar confession; but the dreadful spectacle which is presented to me is not able to make me confirm one lie by another. The life offered me on such infamous terms I abandon without regret."

"The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy …"

"The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas."

"The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures, have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions."

"Painting for me is merely a means of forgetting life. It is a cry in the night. A sob broken off. A strangled laugh."

"Often pagans, with their eyes wide open, do not see very clearly."

"Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical...""

"A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it — the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them."

"I am a believer and a conformist. Anyone can revolt; it is more difficult silently to obey our own interior promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperaments and our gifts — if we have any. I do not say "neither God, nor Master," only in the end to substitute myself for the God I have excommunicated...""

"Like the ostrich, head under wing When the roaring storm breaks, So many people take refuge Under the soft pillow Of specious arguments."

"The old masters are perfect and admirable examples, on condition that we remember that the spirit gives life and the letter kills, and that even the best pastiche is inferior to the harmonious stammering or incoherence of a child trying to speak."

"The painter who loves his art is ruler in his own kingdom, even if he be in Lilliput and a Lilliputian himself. He transforms a kitchen maid in to a fairy, and a great lady into a brothel matron, if he wants to and sees them so, for he is a seer. His vision includes everything that is alive in the past."

"Le premier de tous les empires est celui qu'on a sur ses désirs."

"La gloire de Bossuet est devenue l'une des religions de la France."

"Bossuet was a man you instinctively approached on all fours."