| N° | Quote | Author | My thought or comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | We must not say that science is useful because it allows us to build machines. It must be said: machines are useful because they allow us to do science. | Henri Poincaré | The usefulness of science. |
| 02 | Geological history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that in this very episode conscious thought has lasted and will last only for a moment. The thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but it is that flash that is all. | Henri Poincaré | Text from the book ‘The Value of Science’. |
| 03 | In life, nothing is to be feared, everything is to be understood. | Marie Curie | All the way ahead! |
| 04 | Beautiful chains of reason, all simple and easy. | René Descartes | You just have to be able to start to create them… |
| 05 | There is nothing entirely in our power, only our thoughts. | René Descartes | What a philosophy! |
| 06 | Compound interest is the greatest force in the universe. | Albert Einstein | Diversity is at the service of innovation. |
| 07 | Imagination is more important than knowledge. | Albert Einstein | Imagination opens horizons and redistributes the cards, especially in his life. |
| 08 | Some books are tasted, others are devoured, others are chewed and digested slowly. | Francis Bacon | Learn to taste the books. |
| 09 | Do not laugh, lament, hate but understand. | Baruch Spinoza | The reason for seeking the why. |
| 10 | It is not the most powerful species that survives but the one that best adapts to change. | Charles Darwin | Cf. the theory of evolution. |
| 11 | Electricity will be so cheap that only the rich will still light up with candles. | Thomas Edison | What a visionary! |
| 12 | The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. | Carl Rogers | Ability to change acceptance |
| 13 | I look forward to the day when we invest the equivalent of the cost of one or two rockets in the search for a more adequate understanding of human relationships. | Carl Rogers | Are we really involved in living together? |
| 14 | We already have the knowledge that, when applied, would help to reduce the tensions raised by the industrial, racial and international problems that currently exist. | Carl Rogers | The state of knowledge in the social sciences |
| 15 | I am increasingly convinced that we will eventually discover, with regard to personality and behaviour, laws as significant for human understanding or human progress as those of gravity and thermodynamics. | Carl Rogers | For understanding human behaviour |
| 16 | If I succeed in making a large number of people understand the resources of unused knowledge already available in the field of interpersonal relations, then I will consider myself highly rewarded. | Carl Rogers | Know and Share |
| 17 | Neither the Bible, nor the prophets – neither Freud, nor the search – nor the revelations emanating from God or from men – can take precedence over my direct and personal experience. | Carl Rogers | The place of experience, of lived in a life |
| 18 | It is not because it is infallible that my experience is authoritative. It is the basis of any authority because it can always be verified by primary means. That’s why her frequent mistakes – her fallibility – can always be corrected. | Carl Rogers | The question of the reliability of a life experience |
| 19 | One of the deepest needs of people is to be fully heard, fully understood, and fully accepted. | Carl Rogers | Understanding and acceptance of a person |
| 20 | Perfection is achieved not because there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | A definition of perfection: to know but not necessarily to reach it. |
| 21 | To love is not to look at each other, it is to look together in the same direction. | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Having projects in common, looking at the horizon. |
| 22 | When the truth is not free, freedom is not true. | Jacques Prévert | So that the truth is not in prison… |
| 23 | The real question is not whether machines think but whether humans think. | Burrhus Frederic Skinner | What paths of thought do men take? |
| 24 | Earth is the cradle of humanity, but who wants to spend their whole life in a cradle? | Konstantin Tsiolkovsky | Discover other planets… and other horizons for humanity. |
| 25 | The print media changed the mind as gunpowder changed the war. | Wendell Phillips | The importance of the press… |
| 26 | A society willing to sacrifice a little freedom for a little security does not deserve either and ends up losing both! | Benjamin Franklin | Freedom against security: what a fight! |
| 27 | If God did not exist, it would have to be invented. | Voltaire | Haven’t you done that already? |
| 28 | We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will all die together as idiots. | Martin Luther King | And if possible by being together without being separated… |
| 29 | No free man will be seized, imprisoned or executed in any way without a legal judgment of his peers. | La Magna Carta | Justice must be applied in order not to apply the law of the talion. |
| 30 | From sublime to ridiculous, there is only one step. | Napoléon Bonaparte | Are we on the edge? |
| 31 | Everybody knew it was impossible to do. Then one day someone came in who didn’t know, and he did. | Winston Churchill | Recognizing what is possible is not easy sometimes. |
| 32 | It is a fact that the masses swallow a big lie more easily than a small one. | Adolf Hitler | Mass communication is a really dangerous tool. Beware of skull filling! |
| 33 | You get more by politely asking for a gun in your hand than just politely asking. | Al Capone | The utility of a firearm. |
| 34 | Commercial society, definition: ingenious device promoting individual profit without individual responsibility. | Ambrose Pierce | What an ingenious Milgramian mechanism (cf. sociologist Milgram). |
| 35 | In a car race, to arrive first, you must first arrive. | Enzo Ferrari | To arrive last, you have to arrive recently. And to do just a car race, you also have to just arrive. |
| 36 | Beware of a computer you can’t throw out the window. | Steve Wozniak | How powerful a computer! |
| 37 | Who does not know how to be servant could not be master. | Anton Tchekhov | Being a leader requires a certain knowledge, if not a certain knowledge. |
| 38 | If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need. | Cicéron | Ah, the double culture! |
| 39 | Disorder is the order seen differently. | Hyren | Question of point of view. And why not also: order is disorder seen differently (283 BC) |
| 40 | Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. In French: Happy he who penetrates the secret cause of things. | Virgile | Ah, the question of why and how, it makes you think. |
| 41 | Glory is gained by doing what is worth writing and writing what is worth reading. | Pline l’Ancien | The importance of reading and writing. |
| 42 | Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. | Aristote | Learn critical thinking from an early age. Beware of skeptical doubt too. |
| 43 | The totality is more than the sum of the parts. | Aristote | A definition of the whole by Aristotle. |
| 44 | Astronomy forces the soul to turn to the heavens and guides us from this world to another. | Platon | Knowing how to look at the stars for guidance. |
| 45 | The wise man follows his own direction. | Euripide | Knowing where to set foot… |
| 46 | Words have the power to destroy and heal. When they are just and generous, they can change the world. | Bouddha | Language has sometimes unsuspected virtues. |
| 47 | The wise man devotes himself to meditation; the ignorant refuses to do so. Learn to recognize what makes you progress and what hinders your progress. | Bouddha | Meditation according to Buddha. |
| 48 | Choose a job you love and you won’t have to work a single day of your life. | Confucius | Finding his way… |
| 49 | The man who moves a mountain begins with the small stones. | Confucius | The result of the construction then defies time. |
| 50 | The greatest glory is not never to fall, but to rise at every fall. | Confucius | It’s about knowing how to bounce back (resilience). |
| 51 | The real fault is the one we don’t correct. | Confucius | Making a mistake is human but not correcting it (deliberately) is inhuman. |
| 52 | Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish, and you feed him forever. | Lao Tseu | Learn to teach. |
| 53 | The victor triumphs even before going to war, the vanquished goes to war and then dreams of triumph. | Sun Tzu | When war is an art |
| 54 | The whole world is a huge stage! All, men and women, actors who play their exits, who play their entrances there; each one plays many roles in his life! | William Shakespeare | What a beautiful play a life! |
| 55 | If music feeds love, then play! | William Shakespeare | Music sublimates the soul. |
| 56 | Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. | Oscar Wilde | These are good mistakes in his personal development. |
| 57 | Live your life as if you had to live it forever. | Friedrich Nietzsche | My way of thinking Life |
| 58 | We like to guess others, but we don’t like to be guessed. | La Rochefoucauld | Unravel the mysteries but remain mysterious yourself? |
| 59 | The painter who is about to paint the sun makes theories, and when he wants to start, the sun is no longer there. | Jules Renard | Do not confuse time for reflection with time for action. |
| 60 | The best way to impose an idea on others is to make them believe it comes from them. | Alphonse Daudet | How cynical is that? |
| 61 | Only one who knows how to leave any shore discovers new lands. | André Gide | Learn to jump. Do you want to get wet? |
| 62 | Eternity is long… especially towards the end. | Franz Kafka | Defining the infinity of time is not easy. |
| 63 | The verb love is difficult to conjugate: its past is not simple, its present is only indicative, and its future is always conditional. | Jean Cocteau | Ah, Love! It defies time. |
| 64 | A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life. | André Malraux | What is the value of a human life? The question is asked but what is the answer? |
| 65 | We kill a man, we are a murderer. We kill millions of men, we are a conqueror. We kill them all, we are a god. | Jean Rostand | From the History of Man… |
| 66 | Art is not the representation of a beautiful thing but the representation of a beautiful thing. | Emmanuel Kant | The aesthetics of art. |
| 67 | Who sees the human figure correctly? The photographer, the mirror or the painter? | Pablo Picasso | How about the psychologist? |
| 68 | Some painters turn the sun into a yellow spot; others turn a yellow spot into a sun. | Pablo Picasso | Question of point of view. |
| 69 | Only the peaceful calm of a lake can stem the furious force of a torrent. | Anonyme | Let the torrent of life feed his inner lake. |
| 70 | We can’t turn the tide, but we can turn the sails. | Anonyme | If you can’t go through the door, go through the window (if it exists of course). |
| 71 | Ab uno disce omnes. In French: From one point, get to know all the others. | Anonyme | Learn to learn. |
| 72 | Why don’t we take the time to do it right the first time when we always find time to do it again? | Anonyme | Knowing how to take the time in the right tempo… |
| 73 | Which is the crazier of the two: the crazier himself or whoever follows him? | Anonyme | Madness is always a matter of opinion and even for a madman. |
| 74 | The best is the enemy of the good. | Proverbe | Excess is always harmful. |
| 75 | Cutting a small branch of a shrub at once is very easy, but cutting two at once is much harder. | Proverbe chinois | Is it easier for two? (It is quoted by Tchang, character of Tintin by Hergé) |
| 76 | Don’t throw the arrow that turns against you! | Proverbe kurde | Know not to use destructive weapons. |
| 77 | If you have many riches, give of your good; if you have little, give of your heart. | Proverbe berbère | The heart can do a lot. |
| 78 | If you’re right, get your foot in the stirrup. | Proverbe turc | All the way ahead! |
| 79 | Hunt two hares at a time and you won’t catch any. | Proverbe amérindien | Focusing on one point at a time is more effective… |
| 80 | The very or the too is the enemy of the “just what it takes”. | Sonia Kanclerski | The always too is inhuman. |
| 81 | The true blind are not those who have sick eyes, but those who cannot see, or do not want to see. | Sonia Kanclerski | The same goes for hearing: active listening is really great in relationships between people. |
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