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Tout est poison, rien n'est poison, tout est une question de dose. Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.
Claude Bernard
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote emphasizes that the toxicity of anything depends on the quantity consumed.

Claude Bernard's quote suggests that all substances can be harmful in excessive amounts while also indicating that even typically harmful substances can be harmless in small doses. This concept prompts a deeper reflection on moderation and the context in which we evaluate the safety or danger of things in life.

Themes

PoisonDoseModerationToxicityContext

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a health seminar to discuss nutrition and the importance of moderation.

More from Claude Bernard

When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain.
Claude BernardRead
The goal of scientific physicians in their own science ... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
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Theories are like a stairway; by climbing, science widens its horizon more and more, because theories embody and necessarily include proportionately more facts as they advance.
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True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.
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Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.
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The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.
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