Natural History Quotes - Page 3

• War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

  Ruth Benedict

  War, Play, Earth

  Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.370, Transaction Publishers

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• I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Issues, Important, Atheism

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• what are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Philosophy, Educational, Italian

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• To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

  Charles Babbage

  Medicine, Branches, Chemistry

  Charles Babbage (1830). “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes”, p.12

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• My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else.

  Oliver Sacks

  Monday, Zoos, First Love

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, 1995.

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• I was a reasonably good student in college ... My chief interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type-a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Ambition, Science, College

  Theodore Roosevelt (2013). “Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt”, p.24, Simon and Schuster

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• Yet man does recognise himself [as an animal]. But I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history, I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Science, Animal, Men

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• Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

  John Maynard Smith

  Evolution, Mathematics, Natural

  John Maynard Smith (1988). “Games, sex and evolution”, Prentice Hall

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• Natural history is a matter of observation; it is a harvest which you gather when and where you find it growing. Birds and squirrels and flowers are not always in season, but philosophy we have always with us. It is a crop which we can grow and reap at all times and in all places and it has its own value and brings its own satisfaction.

  John Burroughs

  Philosophy, Flower, Science

  John Burroughs (2008). “Under the Apple-Trees”, p.5, Wildside Press LLC

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• The young earth-solution to reconciling the order of creation with natural history makes good exegetical and theological sense. Indeed, the overwhelming consensus of theologians up through the Reformation held to this view. I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it.

  William A. Dembski

  Strong, Views, Order

  William A. Dembski (2009). “The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World”, p.55, B&H Publishing Group

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• Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies . . . despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.

  Paul Shepard

  Technology, Broken, Historical

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• The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Women, Animal, Perfect

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.173, Courier Corporation

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• I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

  John Keats

  Funny, Thinking, Class

  John Keats (2009). “Selected Letters of John Keats: Revised Edition”, p.263, Harvard University Press

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• To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Writing, Science, Clothes

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (2015). “The Phenomenon of Man”, p.111, Lulu Press, Inc

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• I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.

  Prince Philip

  Animal, Boys, Games

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• From my earliest childhood I nourished and cherished the desire to make a creditable journey in a new country, and write such a respectable account of its natural history as should give me a niche amongst the scientific explorers of the globe I inhabit, and hand my name down as a useful contributor of original matter.

  Joseph Dalton Hooker

  Country, Writing, Science

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• In order to turn natural history into a true science, one would have to devote oneself to investigations capable of telling us not the particular shape of such and such an animal, but the general procedures of nature in the animal's production and preservation.

  Pierre Louis Maupertuis

  Science, Animal, Order

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• The knowledge of Natural-History, being Observation of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most others, and in my slender Opinion, less subject to Mistakes than Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions are; ... These are things we are sure of, so far as our Senses are not fallible; and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them.

  Hans Sloane

  Mistake, Knowledge, Science

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• I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

  Charles Darwin (1902). “Charles Darwin: His Life in an Autobiographical Chapter and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters”, p.267, Library of Alexandria

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• To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

  Thomas Huxley

  Education, Country, Art

  Thomas H. Huxley (1900). “A Library of Universal Literature in Four Parts, Comprising Science, Biography, Fiction and the Great Orations”

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• I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

  Ernest Thompson Seton

  Believe, Science, Belief

  Ernest Thompson Seton (2007). “Wild Animals I Have Known”, p.12, Yesterday's Classics

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• What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.

  Nick Cave

  Art, Taken, Thinking

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• A wise and well-informed humanist has taken the time to look lovingly and wonderingly at the living world around him, and to study the ways in which scientists have tried to analyze the world... THE BEST INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL HISTORY THAT HAS YET BEEN WRITTEN.

  Marston Bates

  Wise, Taken, Looks

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• Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Natural, Theism, Science And Religion

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1959). “Emerson: A Modern Anthology”

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• A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Boys, Men, Pieces

  Henry Ward Beecher (1862). “Eyes and ears”, p.65

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