The biologist passes. The frog stays the same.

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.

There are things that don't deserve to be said briefly.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

We give others praise which we ourselves don't believe, as long as they respond with praise we can believe.

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.

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