Binet Quotes & Sayings

Prudently, night flees the scene. — Laurent Binet

The intelligence of an individual in not a fixed quantity. — Alfred Binet

Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory. — Laurent Binet

Sometimes, after all, there is a bit of justice in this mean, cruel world. — Laurent Binet

I'm fighting a losing battle. I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality. — Laurent Binet

Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded ... We do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improveable. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state. — Alfred Binet

He downs the contents of his glass in a single gulp and, looking at Simon, adds: "This is as amusing as a novel. — Laurent Binet

Or that he's slow, Hal's brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found
but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things. — David Foster Wallace

I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. — Joan Didion

This scene is not really useful, and on top of that I practically made it up. I don't think I'm going to keep it. — Laurent Binet

Heredity, to our understanding is not capable of giving to this illness (paraphilia) its characteristic form ... Heredity invents nothing, creates nothing anew; it has no imagination. — Alfred Binet

That scene, like the one before it, is perfectly believable and totally made up — Laurent Binet

Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Down with dialectics! — Laurent Binet

The homosexuals are the new Jesuits. — Laurent Binet

No, it's not invented! What would be the point of 'inventing' Nazism? — Laurent Binet

He liked cock, this intellectual! — Laurent Binet

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or "mental worth." In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created "does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. "Some recent thinkers," he said, "[have affirmed] that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing. — Ken Robinson

The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured. — Alfred Binet

It's risky to try to determine the moments when a person's life is changed forever. I don't even know if such moments exist. — Laurent Binet

Gabcik - tht's his name - really did exist — Laurent Binet

So, to cut a long story short, they jumped. — Laurent Binet

Glory to the logos, my friends! Long live dialectics! Let the party begin! May the verb be with you! — Laurent Binet

If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading. — Laurent Binet

with the formula: "Any similarity of characters — Laurent Binet

How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery? — Laurent Binet

From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators - Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans' work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an "ink-blot test" in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910) - this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called "inkblots" when American psychologists took them — Damion Searls

Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words. — Alfred Binet

The good thing about writing a true story is that you don't have to worry about giving an impression of realism. — Laurent Binet

A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment. — Alfred Binet

Could we look into the head of a Chess player, we should see there a whole world of feelings, images, ideas, emotion and passion — Alfred Binet

What would you do if you ruled the world?" The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: "Even grammar? — Laurent Binet

You had to choose between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor. You will have war. — Laurent Binet

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on. — Gustave Flaubert

I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion. — Alfred Binet

In the provinces, being queer is worse than being Arab. — Laurent Binet

Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! ... The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description! — Alfred Binet

So the [Binet-Simon]test results were always related to time. Thereby producing a new figure
a measurement of intelligence. A calculated figure,and hence quite objective, All the psychologist had done was to let the children read and answer the questions, record them on a tape, note the times, double-check the figures and refer to the evaluation table. Everything clear and obvious. So that the result was, by and large, exempt from human uncertainty.
Almost scientific. — Peter Hoeg