Switzerland

🇨🇭Jean Piaget

Philosophy

1896–1980

"The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality."

🇨🇭Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

Law

b. 1947

"We don’t want a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots. We don’t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law."

🇨🇭Helen Keller

Literature

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."

🇨🇭Alain Delon

Music

1935–2024

"I do very well three things: my job, stupidities and children. 1"

🇨🇭Florian Cajori

history of mathematics

1859–1930

"Comparatively few of the propositions and proofs in the Elements are his own discoveries. In fact, the proof of the "Theorem of Pythagoras" is the only one directly ascribed to him."

🇨🇭Marie-Louise von Franz

analytical psychology

1915–1961

"Nevertheless, this individual aspect of number appears to contain the mysterious factor that enables it to organize psyche and matter jointly."

🇨🇭Roger Federer

Sports

b. 1981

"For me Roger is the greatest player ever who played the tennis game. It’s always good to see him play and win and we are going to see so much more of Federer in the future; he is going to win more grand slam tournaments."

🇨🇭Ernst Bloch

Philosophy

Surrealism

1885–1977

"Only an atheist can be a good Christian."

🇨🇭César-François de Saussure

Literature

1705–1783

"English workmen are everywhere renowned, and that justly. They work to perfection, and though not inventive, are capable of improving and of finishing most admirably what the French and Germans have invented."

🇨🇭Hans Urs von Balthasar

Religion

1905–1988

"The exalted moment of love is always full of promise: it is not closed in on itself, but open; we see its natural fruitfulness revealed in the child, even if its spiritual fruitfulness remains hidden."

🇨🇭Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Philosophy

German idealism

1821–1881

"A man without passion is only a latent force, only a possibility, like a stone waiting for the blow from the iron to give forth sparks."

🇨🇭Paul Klee

Art

Surrealism

1879–1940

"As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile."

🇨🇭Emil Ludwig

Literature

1881–1948

"As a man without religion, without philosophy, without principles, he balked at nothing. ...e concealed... his desire for self-aggrandizement, and... believes in his own idealism."

🇨🇭Karl Barth

Religion

1886–1968

"Karl Barth's Conception of God" by Martin Luther King, Jr."

🇨🇭Jean Tinguely

Art

Dada

1925–1991

"There is no death! Death only exists for those who cannot accept evolution. Everything changes. Death is a transition from movement to movement. Death is static. Death is movement. Death is static. Death is movement."

🇨🇭Alberto Giacometti

Art

Surrealism

1901–1966

"One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene... The more real a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes."

🇨🇭Karl Jaspers

Philosophy

continental philosophy

1883–1969

"Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility."

🇨🇭Jacques Herzog

Sports

b. 1950

"A city’s architecture is always a bit like a constructed, psychological version of its people."

🇨🇭Jean-Luc Godard

Entertainment

French New Wave

1930–2022

"Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion."

🇨🇭Niklaus Wirth

Science

1934–2024

"Programming is usually taught by examples."

🇨🇭Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

Philosophy

1746–1827

"The circle of knowledge commences close round a man and thence stretches out concentrically."

"Money is here called the a medium and not, as customary, a unit of account because, clearly, money itself is not a unit, but the good whose unit is used as the unit of account."

🇨🇭Albert Cohen

Literature

1895–1981

"I say to myself that her small hands are no more worm, and that I would never again carry them soft to my front."

🇨🇭Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Philosophy

1921–1990

"That there is also freedom in captivity, only a prisoner can claim. Coming from a prison guard, this statement would be blasphemy."

🇨🇭Johann Kaspar Lavater

Literature

1741–1801

"If you see one cold and vehement at the same time, set him down for a fanatic."

🇨🇭Ferdinand de Saussure

Philosophy

1857–1913

"Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other."

🇨🇭Max Frisch

Literature

1911–1991

"Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel..."

🇨🇭Gottfried Schatz

Science

1936–2015

"I am tired of hearing that the DNA in my cells nucleus is the complete blueprint of what is, or could be, me. There is more to me than that. The sequence of my nuclear DNA is not "My Genome."

🇨🇭Martina Hingis

Sports

b. 1980

"They always have big mouths. They always talk a lot. It's happened before, so it's gonna happen again. I don't really worry about that."

🇨🇭Rudolf Steiner

Philosophy

anthroposophy

1861–1925

"Ethical individualism... is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life."

🇨🇭Brother Roger

Religion

1915–2005

"The more a believer wishes to live the absolute call of God, the more essential it is to do so in the heart of human distress."

"The central problem of architecture is space. Space is essential for the individual and for the community. This is equally true for the small space as well as for the large space ."

🇨🇭Jacques Dubochet

Ethics

environmentalism

b. 1942

"Reasonably, all these investments are financial dead-ends or ecological disasters."

"Among others there are three methods for shaping shells: the freely shaped hill, the membrane under pressure and the hanging cloth reversed."

🇨🇭Adrienne von Speyr

Literature

1902–1967

"The ability to suffer and the ability to love are one."

🇨🇭Benjamin Constant

Politics

liberalism

1767–1830

"The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns"