Louis Pasteur Quotes

Luck favors the mind that is prepared. ~ Louis Pasteur

I am utterly convinced that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War, that nations will eventually unite not to destroy but to edify, and that the future will belong to those who have done the most for the sake of suffering humanity. ~ Louis Pasteur

Will opens the door to success, both brilliant and happy. ~ Louis Pasteur

Nothing is lost and nothing is created in the operations of art as those of nature. ~ Louis Pasteur

Cheesecake. Are you shitting me? Who invented that? Probably Jesus of Nazareth. Or maybe Louis Pasteur. It makes me physically sick to think that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet the name of the inventor of cheesecake isn't tattooed on Dick Cheney's face. ~ Rob Delaney

The Ancients understood the omnipotence of the underside of things. ~ Louis Pasteur

The greatest malfunction of spirit is to believe things. ~ Louis Pasteur

There is no such thing as applied science, only the application of pure science. ~ Louis Pasteur

Inspiration is the impact of a fact on a well-prepared mind ~ Louis Pasteur

Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays. ~ Louis Pasteur

I propose to provide proof ... that just as always an alcoholic ferment, the yeast of beer, is found where sugar is converted into alcohol and carbonic acid, so always a special ferment, a lactic yeast, is found where sugar is transformed into lactic acid. And, furthermore, when any plastic nitrogenated substance is able to transform sugar into that acid, the reason is that it is a suitable nutrient for the growth of the [lactic] ferment. ~ Louis Pasteur

Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.
-Louis Pasteur ~ Mitch Kynock

When one works and imagines and dreams of nothing else than the search for answers that God has posed, it is difficult to be so still. ~ Louis Pasteur

The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric. ~ Louis Pasteur

Life comes only from life. ~ Louis Pasteur

Science advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena. ~ Louis Pasteur

The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so. ~ Louis Pasteur

You have not succeeded in your experiments, that is all there is to it. ~ Louis Pasteur

When I approach a child he inspires in me two sentiments tenderness for what he is and respect for what he may become. ~ Louis Pasteur

How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter? ~ Louis Pasteur

The controls of life are structured as forms and nuclear arrangements, in a relation with the motions of the universe. ~ Louis Pasteur

When you believe you have found an important scientific fact, and are feverishly curious to publish it, constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, fight yourself, try and ruin your own experiments, and only proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses. But when, after so many efforts you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul. ~ Louis Pasteur

Fortune favors the well-prepared. ~ Louis Pasteur

Since the most ancient times, all men, and particularly those who endeavored in the practice of medicine, have brought closer together two natural phenomena of capital importance: illness or fever and fermentation. ~ Louis Pasteur

My son, all my life I have loved this science so deeply that I can now hear my heart beat for joy.

{Commenting about Louis Pasteur's accomplishment of separating two asymmetric forms of tartaric acid crystals.} ~ Jean-Baptiste Biot

It is a matter of fact; I approached without a preconceived idea, too ready to declare, if the experiment had imposed upon me the confession, that there was a spontaneous generation, of
which I am convinced today that those who assure it are blindfolded. ~ Louis Pasteur

Every chemical substance, whether natural or artificial, falls into one of two major categories, according to the spatial characteristic of its form. The distinction is between those substances that have a plane of symmetry and those that do not. The former belong to the mineral, the latter to the living world. ~ Louis Pasteur

In good philosophy, the word cause ought to be reserved to the single Divine impulse that has formed the universe. ~ Louis Pasteur

Do not promote what you can't explain, simplify, and prove early. ~ Louis Pasteur

We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer). ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

Chance favors those who are prepared. ~ Louis Pasteur

The grandeur of the acts of men are measured by the inspiration from which they spring. ~ Louis Pasteur

I have the faith of a Breton peasant and by the time I die I hope to have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife. ~ Louis Pasteur

The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely great. ~ Louis Pasteur

Where are the real sources of human dignity, freedom and modern democracy, if not in the concept of infinity to which all men are equal? ~ Louis Pasteur

If you could sit down with Jesus, you wouldn't need anybody else. He could answer all of your questions. Instead of Einstein and Louis Pasteur and Madame Curry, you could just have Jesus and he could answer for all of them. ~ Carol Alt

After death, life reappears in a different form and with different laws. It is inscribed in the laws of the permanence of life on the surface of the earth and everything that has been a plant and an animal will be destroyed and transformed into a gaseous, volatile and mineral substance. ~ Louis Pasteur

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. ~ Jean Rostand

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in. ~ Michael Chabon

Oh my goodness the mystery that has prompted my objective. My quality lies exclusively in my tirelessness. ~ Louis Pasteur

Luck favors the prepared." -Louis Pasteur . . . but actually for me, Edna from The Incredibles. At least I admitted it. ~ Mike Gullickson

Science brings men nearer to God. ~ Louis Pasteur

Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases - which does not seem very likely. ~ Louis Pasteur

One must work; one must work. I have done what I could. ~ Louis Pasteur

But when it has been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic property of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles. Upon this principle I have based a practice. ~ Joseph Lister

One must not assume that an understanding of science is present in those who borrow the language ~ Louis Pasteur

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. ~ Louis Pasteur

It wasn't until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from pre-existing cells. ~ Bill Bryson

The Greeks bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language
the word 'enthusiasm'
en theos
a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it. ~ Louis Pasteur

Science knows no country because it is the light that iluminates the world ~ Louis Pasteur

To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery. ~ Louis Pasteur

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science. ~ Louis Pasteur

As in the experimental sciences, truth cannot be distinguished from error as long as firm principles have not been established through the rigorous observation of facts. ~ Louis Pasteur

There are two men in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observations, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in the hope – the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force that is within him cannot die. ~ Louis Pasteur

If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies [microbes], it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies ... ~ Louis Pasteur

In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph. ~ Louis Pasteur

If perchance you should falter during the journey, a hand would be there to support you. If that should be wanting, God, who alone could take that hand from you, would Himself accomplish its work. ~ Louis Pasteur

The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite. As long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs on human thought, temples will be erected for the worship of the Infinite, whether God be called 'Brahma,' 'Allah,' 'Jehovah,' or 'Jesus'; and on the pavement of those temples men will be seen kneeling, prostrate, annihilated, in the thought of the Infinite. At these supreme moments there is something in the depths of our souls which tells us that the world may be more than a mere continuation of phenomena proper to a mechanical equilibrium brought out of the chaos of the elements through the gradual action of the forces of matter. ~ Louis Pasteur

Little science takes you away from God but more of it takes you to Him. ~ Louis Pasteur

In the fields of observation chance favors only those minds which are prepared. ~ Louis Pasteur

God grant that by my persevering labours I may bring a little stone to the frail and ill-assured edifice of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably failed. ~ Louis Pasteur

The greatest disorder of the mind is to let will direct it. ~ Louis Pasteur

My opinion - nay more, my conviction- is that, in the present state of science, as you rightly say, spontaneous generation is a chimera ; and it would be impossible for you to contradict
me, for my experiments all stand forth to prove that spontaneous generation is a chimera. ~ Louis Pasteur

Lister saw the vast importance of the discoveries of Pasteur. He saw it because he was watching on the heights, and he was watching there alone. ~ Thomas Clifford Allbutt

Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence. ~ Louis Pasteur

My present and most fixed opinion regarding the nature of alcoholic fermentation is this: The chemical act of fermentation is essentially a phenomenon correlative with a vital act, beginning and ending with the latter. I believe that there is never any alcoholic fermentation without their being simultaneously the organization, development, multiplication of the globules, or the pursued, continued life of globules which are already formed. ~ Louis Pasteur

A bit of science distances one from God, but much science nears one to Him. ~ Louis Pasteur

Actually, what we really need to remember about Galileo is that most of the people who use his name in argument could barely spell it, let alone tell us what actually happened to the man. His case is used over and over again because critics can't think of any other scientists who were mistreated by the Church. And in this instance they're right. There may have been some people in the scientific world who did not enjoy Church support and were even challenged by Catholicism but, sorry to disappoint, there weren't very many of them. The Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery, and those who refer to Galileo tend to forget that Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization, was a devout Catholic, as was Alexander Fleming, who gave us penicillin. Or Father Nicolaus Copernicus, who first proposed the theory of the earth revolving around the sun - this was precisely what Galileo stated, but Copernicus taught it as theory and not fact. Or Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, who proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In the field of acceleration, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli changed the way we understand that particular science; the father of modern Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher, and the Yugoslavian Fr. Roger Boscovich was the founder of modern atomic theory. ~ Michael Coren

Wine is the healthiest and most health-giving of drinks. ~ Louis Pasteur

Science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war. ~ Louis Pasteur

Question your priorities often, make sure God always comes first. ~ Louis Pasteur

It would seem to me that I was committing a theft if I were to let one day go by without doing some work. ~ Louis Pasteur

Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. ~ Louis Pasteur

Cultivate your curiosity. Keep it sharp and always working. Consider curiosity your life preserver, your willingness to try something new. Second, enlarge your enthusiasm to include the pursuit to excellence, following every task through to completion. Third, make the law of averages work for you. By budgeting your time more carefully than most people you can make more time available. Does the combination of curiosity, enthusiasm, and the law of averages guarantee success Indeed it does not ... Success in the final analysis always involves luck or the element of chance. Louis Pasteur grasped this well when he said that chance favors the prepared mind. ~ John Hanley Jr.

The universe is asymmetric. ~ Louis Pasteur

Chance favours the prepared mind. ~ Louis Pasteur

If you suppress laboratories, physical science will be stricken with barrenness and death. ~ Louis Pasteur

Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory. ~ Louis Pasteur

Chance favors only be prepared mind. ~ Louis Pasteur

Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word. ~ Louis Pasteur

You bring me the deepest joy that can be felt by a man whose invincible belief is that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War, that nations will unite, not to destroy, but to build, and that the future will belong to those who will have done most for suffering humanity. ~ Louis Pasteur

Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages. ~ Louis Pasteur

In the course of an extended investigation into the nature of inflammation, and the healthy and morbid conditions of the blood in relation to it, I arrived several years ago at the conclusion that the essential cause of suppuration in wounds is decomposition brought about by the influence of the atmosphere upon blood or serum retained within them, and, in the case of contused wounds, upon portions of tissue destroyed by the violence of the injury.

To prevent the occurrence of suppuration with all its attendant risks was an object manifestly desirable, but till lately apparently unattainable, since it seemed hopeless to attempt to exclude the oxygen which was universally regarded as the agent by which putrefaction was effected. But when it had been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic properties of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles. ~ Joseph Lister

One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me ~ Louis Pasteur

There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it. ~ Louis Pasteur

I have only strength and ingenuity, and neither trade nor land. ~ Louis L'Amour

A revolution is a military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace… They do not create revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King's head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The yoke you wear determines the burden you bear. ~ Edwin Louis Cole

I'm hardly the first person to say that you've [Jeffrey Rosen] written a book about a person who has more to say about the current state of being than almost anyone, Louis Brandeis, and yet nobody is talking about Louis Brandeis. ~ Dahlia Lithwick

A woman's uniqueness is her greatest appeal to a man - and his greatest challenge. ~ Edwin Louis Cole

Fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.
William Carlos Williams, c. 1931 ~ William Carlos Williams

If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

I love you," he says, still meeting Harry's eyes, "and it took me a while to get here, but I think that maybe I've always loved you. But you wanna know the other thing that I know for sure? Besides the fact that I love you?"
(...)
"I'm always going to love you," Louis says, tucking some of Harry's hair behind his ear. "No matter what. ~ Whoknows

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. ~ Henry Louis Gates

There is nothing good in love but the physical part. ~ Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality ... the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats. ~ Henry Louis Gates

I'm enjoying the work while I get it right now. ~ Louis C.K.