Francois Jacob Quotes

It is hope that gives life meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks better.

Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

In today's vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the many mysteries that remain about the workings of organisms.

For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

The Place of No Shadows, in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine (1990) In our Universe, matter is arranged in a hierarchy of structures by successive integrations.

Nature is a tinkerer, not an inventor.

The dream of every cell is to become two cells.

I think I've just thought up something important,

What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.