Botanist Quotes

Adelbert von Chamisso

Joseph Dalton Hooker

Herman Boerhaave

Robert Brown (botanist)

Robert Brown (botanist, born 1773)

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Hugo De Vries

Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

A student who can weave his technology into the fabric of society can claim to have a liberal education; a student who cannot weave his technology into the fabric of society cannot claim even to be a good technologist.

Eric Ashby, Baron Ashby

[Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months.

Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath.

This constitution we designate by the word genotype. The word is entirely independent of any hypothesis; it is fact, not hypothesis that different zygotes arising by fertilisation can thereby have different qualities, that, even under quite similar conditions of life, phenotypically diverse individuals can develop.

Wilhelm Johannsen

These motions were such as to satisfy me, after frequently repeated observation, that they arose neither from currents in the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself.

Summary of Brownian motion

Robert Brown (botanist)

Each shell, each crawling insect holds a rank Important in the plan of Him, who fram'd This scale of beings; holds a rank, which lost Would break the chain, and leave behind a gap Which nature's self would rue.

Benjamin Stillingfleet

It was to Hofmeister, working as a young man, an amateur and enthusiast, in the early morning hours of summer months, before business, at Leipzig in the years before 1851, that the vision first appeared of a common type of Life-Cycle, running through Mosses and Ferns to Gymnosperms and Flowering Plants, linking the whole series in one scheme of reproduction and life-history.

Arthur Harry Church

I firmly believe that contemporary spiritual use of entheogenic drugs is one of humankind's brightest hopes for overcoming the ecological crisis from which we threaten the biosphere and jeopardize our own survival, for Homo sapiens is close to the head of the list of endangered species.

Truth is on a curve whose asymptote our spirit follows eternally.

Nature appears not to have intended that any flower should be fertilized by its own pollen.

Christian Konrad Sprengel

Between the lowest and the highest degree of spiritual and corporal perfection, there is an almost infinite number of intermediate degrees. The succession of degrees comprises the Universal Chain. It unites all beings, ties together all worlds, embraces all the spheres. One SINGLE BEING is outside this chain, and this is HE who made it.

In the gametes of an individual hybrid the Anlagen for each individual parental character are found in all possible combinations but never in a single gamete the Anlagen for a pair of characters. Each combination occurs with approximately the same frequency.

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

Arthur Henry Reginald Buller

How much the making of a garden, no matter how small, adds to the joy of living, only those who practice the arts and the science can know.

Ernest Henry Wilson

When I spoke, I was listened to; and I was at a loss to know how I had so easily acquired the art of commanding attention, and giving the tone to the conversation.

Adelbert von Chamisso

I am fully conscious that a complete presentation of the regions visited is a task beyond my power. All I can strive to do is convey an illusion-my own illusion

Frank Kingdon-Ward

If we may use a metaphor, we might say that Botanical Science is like a mountaineer, who, after long, weary climbing, only discovers that after all there still rises - steep and apparently impossible to scale - the real peak; but, notwithstanding this, on casting his eyes around, he finds himself well rewarded for the toil he has undergone.

Karl Ritter von Goebel

Death, my son, is a good for all; it is the night of this worrisome day that one calls life.

In French: La mort, mon fils, est un bien pour tous les hommes; elle est la nuit de ce jour inquiet qu'on appelle la vie.

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

The noble aim of university teaching is the lifting of mankind to a higher appreciation of the ideas of life and truth. It has to cultivate the most intimate connection between theory and practice, between abstract science and actual life.

The creation of man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple or the growth of a snowbank. All are alike supernatural, for they all rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of matter, the conservation of energy, and the immanence of law.

David Starr Jordan

I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world.

G. Ledyard Stebbins

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.

Reginald Farrer

Nature produces individuals and nothing more

Charles Edwin Bessey

A record of research should not resemble a casual pile of quarried stone; it should seem "not built, but born", as Vasari said in praise of a building.