[…] il n’y a pas de remède plus efficace aux excès délirants de l’amour… que le mariage.
Donna Leon (Mort à La Fenice, trad. William Olivier Desmond, p.126, Quebecor, 1997)
Qui dit équilibre dit menace qu’il se rompe. Aucune stabilité n’est jamais qu’équilibre.
Maurice Druon (Le pouvoir, p.12, Hachette (Notes et maximes), 1964)
But even as the influence of decentralized ideas grows, there is a deepseated resistance to such ideas. At some deep level, people seem to have strong attachments to centralized ways of thinking. When people see patterns il the world (like a flock of birds), they often assume that there is some type of centralized control (a leader of the flock). According to this way of thinking, a pattern can exist only if someone (or something) creates and orchestrates the pattern. Everything must have cause, an ultimate controlling factor. The continuing resistance to evolutionary theories is an example : many people still insist that someone or something must have explicitly designed the complex, orderly structures that we call Life.
Mitchel Resnick (Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, p.7, MIT Press, 1994)
Plus il est d’ennemis, plus la victoire est belle.
Hippolyte Bis (Attila, acte 1, sc. 4 (Attila), 1822)
[…] l’incertitude me paraît quelquefois beaucoup plus près de la vérité que les solutions catégoriques.
Julien Green (Mon premier livre en anglais, p.67, in L’apprenti psychiatre, Livre de Poche n° 5006)