Biologist Quotes

If I had any advice to [give] you it is just this: love science but do not worship it. Put science in its proper place, ranking it along with philosophy and history, music and religion, literature and art. If I had my life to live again (Darwin says), I would make it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

Richard M. Eakin

Science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth and that service is indeed communal. It cannot be rigidly planned. Rather, it requires freedom and courage and the plural contributions of many different kinds of people who must maintain their individuality while giving to the group.

Human power, which mounted slowly indeed through the eons of prehistory and somewhat more rapidly after the advent of the sword and pen, has gathered momentum with logarithmic sweep since the dawn of modern science. Today it seems to be rocketing into outer space with the incredible energy of atomic fission.

H. Bentley Glass

Recall some of the lectures you may have heard recently. Did you always know why the research had been done? Was it clear what problem was being illuminated by the data presented?

John Alexander Moore

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

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

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

It is not extraordinary that young taxonomists are trained like performing monkeys, almost wholly by imitation, and that in only the rarest cases are they given any instruction in taxonomic theory.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Michael E. Soulé

Science, with technology, is the only way we have to avoid starvation, disease, and premature death. The misapplication of science and technology is due to the fact that the politics are wrong. Now my own view is that the politics are indeed wrong; but politics and science are so closely interrelated that they can hardly be separated.

Maurice Wilkins

Remote and imperturbable, the lives of whales are somehow enough to match any fantasy humanity can create. They are what we have lost, what we yearn for.

[The aard-vark] stands quite alone in the mammalian tree of life, like a single green leaf caught adventitiously in a spider's web.

Ivan T. Sanderson

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

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

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

The nerves have been hitherto considered as chords that have no powers of contraction within themselves, but only serving as a medium, by means of which the influence of the brain may be communicated to the muscles, and the impressions made upon the different parts of the body conveyed to the brain.

"Every single new idea in chemistry has come not from the minds of chemists but from nature...

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

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

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

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

Ross Granville Harrison

Freedom is the range of opportunities available to an individual - the more he has to choose from, the freer his choices. Science creates freedom by widening our range of understanding and therefore the possibilities from which we can choose.

David Baltimore

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

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.

When I went from academia to a company, they don't care how many committees you are on, how many papers you have. What counts is that you have a product that has an effect. The ego is wiped out. It is so much better.

Katalin Karikó