Top 70 Jean Rostand Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

— Jean Rostand

2. “A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.”

— Jean Rostand

3. “My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.”

— Jean Rostand

4. “Theories pass. The frog remains.”

— Jean Rostand

5. “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.”

— Jean Rostand

6. “We spend our time envying people whom we wouldn’t wish to be.”

— Jean Rostand

7. “To be adult is to be alone.”

— Jean Rostand

8. “A married couple are well suited when both partners usually feel the need for a quarrel at the same time.”

— Jean Rostand

9. “On the brink of being satiated, desire still appears infinite.”

— Jean Rostand

10. “In our ideals we unwittingly reveal our vices.”

— Jean Rostand

11. “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.”

— Jean Rostand

12. “One kills a man, one is an assassin; one kills millions, one is a conqueror; one kills everybody, one is a god.”

— Jean Rostand

13. “To reflect is to disturb one’s thoughts.”

— Jean Rostand

14. “Literature: proclaiming in front of everyone what one is careful to conceal from one’s immediate circle.”

— Jean Rostand

15. “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.”

— Jean Rostand

16. “It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.”

— Jean Rostand

17. “Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.”

— Jean Rostand

18. “The biologist passes. The frog stays the same.”

— Jean Rostand

19. “Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.”

— Jean Rostand

20. “In politics, yesterday’s lie is attacked only to flatter today’s.”

— Jean Rostand

21. “Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.”

— Jean Rostand

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

— Jean Rostand

23. “Quotations – always inexact. I don’t trust people who cannot even copy out.”

— Jean Rostand

24. “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.”

— Jean Rostand

25. “Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.”

— Jean Rostand

26. “Far too often the choices reality proposes are such as to take away one’s taste for choosing.”

— Jean Rostand

27. “It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths.”

— Jean Rostand

28. “We find it easy to believe that praise is sincere: why should anyone lie in telling us the truth?”

— Jean Rostand

29. “It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.”

— Jean Rostand

30. “Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she has thought much worse things about you.”

— Jean Rostand

31. “Kill one man, and you are murderer.”

— Jean Rostand

32. “Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language.”

— Jean Rostand

33. “The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions.”

— Jean Rostand

34. “We give others praise which we ourselves don’t believe, as long as they respond with praise we can believe.”

— Jean Rostand

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

— Jean Rostand

36. “When I was young I pitied the old. Now old, it is the young I pity.”

— Jean Rostand

37. “Being right is less important to us than the freedom to be wrong.”

— Jean Rostand

38. “Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.”

— Jean Rostand

39. “In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one’s party three times a day.”

— Jean Rostand

40. “Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.”

— Jean Rostand

41. “I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.”

— Jean Rostand

42. “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.”

— Jean Rostand

43. “To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.”

— Jean Rostand

44. “Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness.”

— Jean Rostand

45. “There are things that don’t deserve to be said briefly.”

— Jean Rostand

46. “God, that checkroom of our dreams.”

— Jean Rostand

47. “Marriage simplifies life and complicates the day.”

— Jean Rostand

48. “In art as in life the valid sacrifices are those that bring no income.”

— Jean Rostand

49. “Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become.”

— Jean Rostand

50. “There are some persons we could not cut down to size without diminishing ourselves as well.”

— Jean Rostand