A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,—"Art is myself, science is ourselves."

Bernard's aphorism (alternate translation: "Art is I, science is we") is actually a creative paraphrase of a longish passage in Victor Hugo's William Shakespeare (1864), Book III, Ch. IV. See in the English translation (London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1910), pp. 82–83.