Alexis Carrel Quotes

Alexis Carrel delivers concise, plain-spoken insights on action, technology and safety that feel like a practical guide.

15 quotes

1. To accomplish our destiny it is not enough merely to guard prudently against road accidents. We must also cover before nightfall the distance assigned to each of us.

2. Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.

3. 'An ordinary man can in a day's time travel by train from a dead little town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust, and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a great capital city bristling with lights, gestures, and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China, the London and New York suffragettes, Doctor Carrel, and the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo:' ~ Filippo Tommaso (F.T.) Marinetti, Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom (June 1913)

4. The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the results obtained.

5. One must train oneself, by small and frequent efforts, to dominate one's feelings.

6. Science has to be understood in its broadest sense, as a method for apprehending all observable reality, and not merely as an instrument for acquiring specialized knowledge.

7. As to virtue . . . it is an act of the will, a habit which increases the quantity, intensity and quality of life. It builds up, strengthens and vivifies personality.

8. Man offers himself to God. He stands before Him like the canvas before the painter or the marble before the sculptor. At the same time he asks for His grace, expresses his needs and those of his brothers in suffering. Such a type of prayer demands complete renovation. The modest, the ignorant, and the poor are more capable of this self-denial than the rich and the intellectual.

9. All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people.

10. Logic never attracts men to the point of carrying them away.

11. The Asiatics and the Africans, such as the Russians, the Arabs, the Hindus, are increasing with marked rapidity. Never have the European races been in such great peril as today.

12. Religion brings to man an inner strength, spiritual light, and ineffable peace.

13. Prayer, like radium, is a luminous and self-generating form of energy.

14. The difficulty of finding organs suitable for transplantation on man must be met.

15. The best way of increasing the [average] intelligence of scientists would be to reduce their number.