Jacques Monod Quotes

I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the ‘ought’ from the ‘is.’ My point of view is that this is impossible; this is a farce.

Man’s destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.

What I have tried to show is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity – that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe.

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

Je cherche Г  comprendre.

There are living systems; there is no’living matter’.

In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.

In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.

Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.

Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

There are living systems; there is no living “matter.” No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.