Alexander von Humboldt Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

True cosmical views are the result of observation and ideal combination, and of a long-continued communion with the external world; nor are they a work of a single people, but the fruits yielded by reciprocal communication, and by a great, if not general, intercourse between different nations.

Alexander von Humboldt
In infinity of space as well as in eternity of time, all things are shrouded in an uncertain and frequently deceptive twilight.

Alexander von Humboldt
Nothing is stationary in space. Even the fixed stars move.

Alexander von Humboldt
An equal appreciation of all branches of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences is a special requirement of the present age, in which the material wealth and the growing prosperity of nations are principally based upon a more enlightened employment of the products and forces of Nature.

Alexander von Humboldt
While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more enobled by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom; a freedom which, in the ruder conditions of society, belongs only to the individual, but which, in social states enjoying political institutions, appertains as a right to the whole body of the community.

Alexander von Humboldt
Man cannot act upon Nature, or appropriate her forces to his own use, without comprehending their full extent and having an intimate acquaintance with the laws of the physical world.

Alexander von Humboldt
Devoted from my earliest youth to the study of nature, feeling with enthusiasm the wild beauties of a country guarded by mountains and shaded by ancient forests, I experienced in my travels, enjoyments which have amply compensated for the privations inseparable from a laborious and often agitated life.

Alexander von Humboldt
Conclusions based upon analogies may fill up a portion of the vast chasm which separates the certain results of a mathematical natural philosophy from conjectures verging on the extreme, and therefore obscure and barren confines of all scientific development of mind.

Alexander von Humboldt
Nature is a free domain ; and the profound conceptions and enjoyments she awakens within us can only be vividly delineated by thought clothed in exalted forms of speech, worthy of bearing witness to the majesty and greatness of the creation.

Alexander von Humboldt
The higher enjoyments yielded by the study of nature depend upon the correctness and the depth of our views, and upon the extent of the subjects that may be comprehended in a single glance.

Alexander von Humboldt
It would be a denial of the dignity of human nature and the relative importance of the faculties with which we are endowed, were we to condemn at one time austere reason engaged in investigating causes and their natural connections, and at another that exercise of the imagination which prompts and excites discoveries by its creative powers.

Alexander von Humboldt
That which for a long time remains merely an object of vague intuition, by degrees acquires the certainty of positive truth; and man, as an I immortal poet has said, in our own tongue - Amid ceaseless change seeks the unchanging pole.

Alexander von Humboldt
The mere accumulation of unconnected observations of details, devoid of generalization of ideas, may doubtlessly have tended to create and foster the deeply rooted prejudice, that the study of the exact sciences must necessarily chill the feelings, and diminish the nobler enjoyments attendant upon a contemplation of nature.

Alexander von Humboldt
Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

Alexander von Humboldt
At the limits of circumscribed knowledge, as from some lofty island shore, the eye delights to penetrate to distant regions.

Alexander von Humboldt
Science is the labor of mind applied to nature...

Alexander von Humboldt
One of the noblest characteristics which distinguish modern civilization from that of remoter times is, that it has enlarged the mass of our conceptions, rendered us more capable of perceiving the connection between the physical and intellectual world, and thrown a more general interest over objects which heretofore occupied only a few scientific men, because those objects were contemplated separately, and from a narrower point of view.

Alexander von Humboldt
Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet comforting and strengthening influence on the wearied mind, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths.

Alexander von Humboldt
Statistical projections which speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind, possess the advantage of fixing the attention on a great number of important facts.

Alexander von Humboldt
That which we call the Atlantic Ocean is only a valley excavated by the force of the waters; the form of the seacoast, the salient and re-entrant angles of America, of Africa, and of Europe proclaim this catastrophe.

Alexander von Humboldt
The great and solemn spirit that pervades the intellectual labor [of science] arises from the sublime consciousness of striving toward the infinite, and of grasping all that is revealed to us amid the boundless and inexhaustible fullness of creation, development, and being.

Alexander von Humboldt
The belief in the uncommon and the wonderful lends a definite outline to every manifestation of ideal creation; and the realm of fancy a fairy-land of cosmological, geognostical and magnetic visions becomes thus involuntarily blended with the domain of reality.

Alexander von Humboldt