21+ Jacques Monod Quotes On Art, Education And World

Jacques Monod was a French biologist and Nobel Prize winner. He was a pioneer in the field of molecular biology and is best known for his work on gene regulation and the operon theory. Monod also made important contributions to the fields of enzymology, biochemistry, and philosophy of science. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jacques Monod on love, life, art.

Top 10 Jacques Monod Quotes

1. There are living systems; there is no'living matter'.
2. What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. The scientific attitude implies the postulate of objectivity-that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan; that there is no intention in the universe.
6. Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.
7. A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.
8. The whole concert of animate nature arose entirely from annoying noises.
9. Je cherche à comprendre.
10. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

Jacques Monod Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. — 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

The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. ... Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050. — Jacques Monod

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology. — Jacques Monod

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere. — Jacques Monod

One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. 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. — 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

Man's destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. — Jacques Monod

Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. — Jacques Monod

Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup." — Jacques Monod

Life Lessons by Jacques Monod

1. Jacques Monod taught us that the key to understanding life is to understand the underlying biochemical processes.
2. He demonstrated that the same laws of physics and chemistry that govern inanimate matter also govern the behavior of living organisms.
3. He showed us that life is not a miracle, but a product of the laws of nature and that by understanding these laws, we can gain insight into the complexity of life.