A Quote

This famous quote belongs to the French philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019). He was a historian of science and a member of the Académie Française, known for his poetic way of explaining complex ideas about communication and knowledge.

“If you have a loaf of bread and I have a euro, and I use my euro to buy your bread, at the end of the exchange I will have the bread and you will have the euro. It seems like a perfect balance, doesn’t it? A has a euro, B has a loaf of bread; afterwards, A has the bread and B has the euro. It is a fair transaction, but a purely material one. Now, imagine that you have a Verlaine sonnet or you know Pythagoras’ theorem, and I have nothing. If you teach me, at the end of this exchange, I will have learned the sonnet and the theorem, but you will still have them too. In this case, there is not just balance, but growth. In the first case, there is an exchange; in the second, there is sharing.“

About the Author: Michel Serres

Serres often wrote about the “Third-Instructed” (Le Tiers-Instruit), arguing that true education happens when we move beyond our own boundaries to meet others. This specific quote is frequently used to illustrate the “Philosophy of the Gift”—the idea that knowledge is one of the few things in the world that multiplies when it is divided.