Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Jean Grey Girls flirt with the dangerous guy, they don't bring him home... they marry the good guy.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

It may offend us to hear our own thoughts expressed by others: we are not sure enough of their souls.

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.

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

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

Science has made gods of us before we were even worthy of being men.

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn't bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don't like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn't suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

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.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

To be adult is to be alone.

The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

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

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes. Now they're lunch, and we're number one on the planet.

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..

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity -- all I hope for in my clothes.

The ideal, without doubt, varies, but its enemies, alas, are always the same.

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

God, that dumping ground of our dreams.

God, that checkroom of our dreams.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

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

To hate fatigues.

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.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

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.

We are not nanve enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.

Falsity cannot keep an idea from being beautiful; there are certain errors of such ingenuity that one could regret their not ranking among the achievements of the human mind.

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

We must watch over our modesty in the presence of those who cannot understand its grounds.

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

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

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

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

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

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

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.

I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

To reflect is to disturb one's thoughts.

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

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

Jean and I blew a ton of savings so we could fly Concorde just to see the curvature of the earth. It's something you don't normally get to see, so I figured out, if you can do it, do it.