Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
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.
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.
I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.
The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions.
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.