19th-century Biologist Quotes

Louis Pasteur

Alexander Fleming

Thomas Henry Huxley

Élie Metchnikoff

Paul Ehrlich

Alexis Carrel

Karl Landsteiner

Science should not concern itself in any way with the philosophical consequences of its discoveries.

The select who engage in science must look upon knowledge as a treasure entrusted to their care, but belonging to the whole people.

Kliment Timiryazev

A group is often slower to see the flame of truth than a single open-minded individual. A group must be conservative and being so may run the danger of attempting to hold with both the old and the new—an impossibility when one is incompatible with the other.

Ernest Everett Just

The term Invertebrata is also a mere collective name; it is employed to designate all animals which do not belong to the phylum Vertebrata. Like the name Metazoa its convenience in promoting terseness of expression is its only justification.

Ernest MacBride

The spirit of speculation is the same as the spirit of science, namely... a desire to know the causes of things.

A generalization is a mountain of observations; from the summit the outlook is broad. The great observer climbs to the outlook, while the mere thinker struggles to imagine it.

Charles Sedgwick Minot

Their universal presence in the cell, coupled with the known properties of bacteria, appear to indicate that mitochondria represent the end adjustment of a fundamental biologic process. The establishment of intimate microsymbiotic complexes has been designated "symbionticism" by the author....

The study of that which is thus common to all things, is the study of mathematics; and therefore mathematics, or the science of number, is and must be the most fundamental of all sciences, since it pertains to every other, and no other can be pursued without it.

St. George Jackson Mivart

No competent scientist ought to believe these things on first hearing.

Karl von Frisch

Error is all around us and creeps in at the least opportunity. Every method is imperfect.

Charles Nicolle

It is because science is sure of nothing that it is always advancing.

It is the mystery and beauty of organic form that sets the problem for us.

Ross Granville Harrison

Whenever the organism enjoys immunity, the introduction of infectious microbes is followed by the accumulation of mobile cells, of white corpuscles of the blood in particular which absorb the microbes and destroy them.

Élie Metchnikoff

The study of nature is a limitless field, the most fascinating adventure in the world.

Margaret Morse Nice

Just as in Christian countries there is a catechism of morals, which everyone knows by heart, but which no one considers it his duty to follow, or expects to see followed by others - so zoology also has its dogmas, which are just as generally professed as they are denied in practice.

One of the most fruitful sequels of the scientific age has been the new and higher valuation which it places upon ordinary human life.

William Thompson Sedgwick

No one who attentively examines the progress of any department of Science, save such as are (like Mathematics or Metaphysics) of a purely abstract character, can fail to perceive how much it is dependent upon the perfection of its instruments.

William Benjamin Carpenter

Force is as absolutely inscrutable as mind. Force can never be known in itself; it is known by its manifestations. It is not a phenomenon; it produces phenomena. We cannot know it; but we know nothing without it.

William Dallinger

Parasitism, mutualism, lichenism, etc., are each special cases of that one general association for which the term symbiosis is proposed as the collective name.

Heinrich Anton de Bary

At last, in the most recent times, an unexpected knowledge of the secret life energies of bacteria has been revealed, through which they rule with demoniacal power over the weal and woe, and even over the life and death of man.

Above all, a plant, an oak for example, is an animal. An enormous animal in which live parasites or rather symbionts, an infinite multitude of small microscopic green organisms, of the species of unicellular "algae," cyano-phyceae.

Konstantin Mereschkowski

Even within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

The morphological characteristics of plant and animal species form the chief subject of the descriptive natural sciences and are the criteria for their classification. But not until recently has it been recognized that in living organisms, as in the realm of crystals, chemical differences parallel the variation in structure.

Karl Landsteiner

It is entirely in line with the accidental nature of natural mutations that extensive tests have agreed in showing the vast majority of them detrimental to the organism in its job of surviving and reproducing, just as changes accidentally introduced into any artificial mechanism are predominantly harmful to its useful operation.

Hermann Joseph Muller

[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.

Francis Maitland Balfour