Linnaeus Quotes

• Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

  Charles Darwin

  Two, Different, Way

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.727, VM eBooks

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• Linnea.... A plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space - from Linnaeus who resembles it.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Space, Lapland, Plant

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• Linnaeus had it constantly in mind:'The closer we get to know the creatures around us, the clearer is the understanding we obtain of the chain of nature, and its harmony and system, according to which all things appear to have been created.'

  Sten Lindroth

  Nature, Science, Understanding

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• The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species.

  Wilfred Trotter

  Butterfly, Air, Hands

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• God created, Linnaeus ordered.

  Sten Lindroth

  God, Science, Order

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• I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

  Charles Darwin

  Book, Men, Two

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.727, VM eBooks

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• The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic] … Wordsworth … Keats … Chateaubriand … Senancour.

  Matthew Arnold

  Animal, Men, Giving

  Matthew Arnold (1869). “Essays in Criticism”, p.76

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