Francois Jacob famous quotes

03-25-2025

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.
-- Francois Jacob

#Hope #Giving #One Day
I think Iâ€™ve just thought up something important,
-- Francois Jacob

#Thinking #Important
The dream of every cell is to become two cells.
-- Francois Jacob

#Dream #Cells #Two
Nature is a tinkerer, not an inventor.
-- Francois Jacob

#Inventor
I had turned my anxiety into my profession.
-- Francois Jacob

#Anxiety #Profession
Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly fine-grained conception of what is called reality.
-- Francois Jacob

#Real #Drawing #Imagination
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.
-- Francois Jacob

#Answers #World #Next
In todayâ€™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.
-- Francois Jacob

#Night #Impact #Competition
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.
-- Francois Jacob

#Shadow #Fiction #Magazines
The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... 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... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.
-- Francois Jacob

#Real #Ignorance #Race
Evolution is a tinkerer.
-- Francois Jacob

#Evolution
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.
-- Francois Jacob

#Science #World #Limits
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.
-- Francois Jacob

#Giving #Association #Novelty
One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future.
-- Francois Jacob

#Looks #Produce #Function

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