Jacques Monod Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.

Jacques Monod
A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

Jacques Monod
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.

Jacques Monod
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.

Jacques Monod
Any mingling of knowledge with values is unlawful, forbidden.

Jacques Monod
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Jacques Monod
One may well find oneself beginning to doubt whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random...nevertheless although the miracle of life stands "explained" it does not strike us as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, What this professor says is far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe.

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

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

Jacques Monod
What I consider completely sterile is the attitude, for instance, of Bertalanffy who is going around and jumping around for years saying that all the analytical science and molecular biology doesn't really get to interesting results; let's talk in terms of general systems theory... there cannot be anything such as general systems theory, it's impossible. Or, if it existed, it would be meaningless.

Jacques Monod
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.

Jacques Monod