Jean Rostand Quotes

For me, when we're all human beings, it's just interesting that we cannot understand the other person or how they think. That's one part of the human aspect that fascinates me.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

I think as long as I can tell you a story about people that you understand, it doesn't matter if you don't like what they do; you understand why they did it.

Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves.

As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prarie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits.

There's really no "bad" people; there's just humans who are doing the best they can to figure life out. It's hard! We can all relate to that.

There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" : but beavers and their dams are.

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions.

People don't change just because you know more about them.

To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.

Nature is honest, we aren't; we embalm our dead.

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.

Never can custom conquer nature, for she is ever unconquered.

Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.

There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the laws which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man.

It's useless to lecture a human.

I know no study that will take you nearer the way to happiness than the study of nature - and I include in the study of nature not only things and their forces, but also mankind and their ways, and the moulding of the affections and the will into an earnest desire not only to be happy, but to create happiness.

Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.