The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.

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Source, in full

This is misattributed to Pasteur in multiple sources, usually used as evidence that he had recanted germ theory, but it also appears in scientific literature. The actual quote is of Claude Bernard, a contemporary of Pasteur who disagreed with germ theory, as quoted in "The Terrain Within: A Naturalistic Way to Think" (2012), and "Louis Pasteur, and the Myth of Pasteurization" (2013)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Louis Pasteur (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.