Natural History Quotes - Page 2

• Birds, it must be admitted, are the most exciting and most deserving of the vertebrates; they are perhaps the best entre into the study of natural history, and a very good wedge into conservation awareness.

  Roger Tory Peterson

  Bird, Study, Awareness

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• It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.

  Alfred Russel Wallace

  Animal, Organization, Habit

  Alfred Russel Wallace (1869). “The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise”, p.267, London, Macmillan

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• We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

  Murray Bookchin

  Spring, Ocean, Journey

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• Beyond natural history Other biological sciences take up the study at other levels of organization: dissecting the individual into organs and tissues and seeing how these work together, as in physiology; reaching down still further to the level of cells, as in cytology; and reaching the final biological level with the study of living molecules and their interactions, as in biochemistry. No one of these levels can be considered as more important than any other.

  Marston Bates

  Science, Cells, Organization

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• Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.

  Robert Falcon Scott

  School, Boys, Games

  Last letter to his wife, in 'Scott's Last Expedition' (1913) vol. 1, ch. 20

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• Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

  William Irwin Thompson

  History Of Life, Fairy Tale, Natural

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• Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape

  Oliver Sacks

  Reflection, Museums, Drs

  Oliver Sacks (1998). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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• The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.

  Michael E. DeBakey

  Science, Progress, Study

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• My father... never required me to study anything, but he knew how to inspire in me a great desire for knowledge. Before learning to read, my greatest pleasure was to listen to passages from Buffon's natural history. I constantly requested him to read me the history of animals and birds.

  Andre-Marie Ampere

  Father, Animal, Bird

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• Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

  Charles Lamb

  Thinking, Wife, Childhood

  Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “The Works of Charles Lamb: To which are Prefixed, His Letters, and a Sketch of His Life”, p.118

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• I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

  Richard Dawkins

  Country, Names, Parent

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• I can no more explain why I like "natural history" than why I like California canned peaches; nor why I do not care for that enormous brand of natural history which deals with invertebrates any more than why I do not care for brandied peaches. All I can say is that almost as soon as I began to read at all I began to like to read about the natural history of beasts and birds and the more formidable or interesting reptiles and fishes.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Animal, California, Interesting

  Theodore Roosevelt (1941). “Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia”

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• I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

  David Attenborough

  Travel, Animal, Order

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• When I train, I love to take time off and fly to the Natural History Museum or an exhibition. I just love that. When you know your past, it will help you with your future… That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with. I’m married to my work right now. But you never know. One day I could wake up and just do something different. Life is so unpredictable.

  Georges St-Pierre

  Girlfriend, Hard Times, Past

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• God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.

  August Strindberg

  Book, Writing, Heart

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• But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.

  Richard Owen

  Elude Us, Vagueness, Tests

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• If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moon, Skeletons, Museums

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• I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780)

  John Adams

  Children, Philosophy, War

  Letter to Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780

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• I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Mistake, Fossils, Emmanuel

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• I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

  Richard Lewontin

  Queens, Top Down, Psychology

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

  David Attenborough

  Animal, Knowing, Trying

  "David Attenborough: 'I'm an essential evil'". Interview with Susanna Rustin, www.theguardian.com. October 21, 2011.

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• We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it, let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Communication, Space

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• Yes, Isaac Taylor, who has just published 'The World of Mind,' is the Isaac Taylor, author of the 'Natural History of Enthusiasm.' I dare say by this time there is a want of fatty particles in his brain.

  George Eliot

  Mind, Brain, Want

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• For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

  David Nicholls

  Children, Book, Parent

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• If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.

  Dominic Monaghan

  Couple, Years, Careers

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