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Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
(22 Apr 1766 - 14 Jul 1817)
French-Swiss author was one of the best-known women in Europe of the 19th century. She influenced European thought and literature, with her many writings, including novels, plays, poems, history, biographical memoirs, and literary criticism, as well as moral and political essays.
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Science Quotes by Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (2 quotes)
Nothing is less applicable to life than mathematical reasoning. A proposition in mathematics is decidedly false or true. Everywhere else the true is mingled with the false.
— Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Quoted, without citation, in David Eugene Smith, The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics (1904), 170.
The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.
— Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
As translated in Kate Louise Roberts (ed.), Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), 635. Also gives, without citation, the original French, “L’esprit humain fait progrès toujours, mais c’est progrès en spirale.”
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
