D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - On Growth and Form (1917)

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Sooner or later nature does everything that is physically possible.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
For the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Numerical precision is the very soul of science.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Sagging wrinkles, hanging breasts and many another sign of age are part of gravitation's slow relentless handiwork.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
[A] flock of flamingos, wearing on rosy breast and crimson wings a garment of invisibility, fades away into the sky at dawn or sunset like a cloud incarnadine.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
As soon as we adventure on the paths of the physicist, we learn to weigh and to measure, to deal with time and space and mass and their related concepts, and to find more and more our knowledge expressed and our needs satisfied through the concept of number, as in the dreams and visions of Plato and Pythagoras...

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
We call a thing big or little with reference to what it is wont to be, as we speak of a small elephant or a big rat.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, molded and conformed.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Our own study of organic form, which we call by Goethe's name of Morphology, is but a portion of that wider still Science of Form which deals with the forms assumed by matter under all aspects and conditions, and, in a still wider sense, with forms which are theoretically imaginable.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
We rise from the conception of form to an understanding of the forces which gave rise to it... in the representation of form we see a diagram of forces in equilibrium, and in the comparison of kindred forms we discern the magnitude and the direction of the forces which have sufficed to convert the one form into the other.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Crystals lie outside the province of this book; yet snow-crystals, and all the rest besides, have much to teach us about the variety, the beauty and the very nature of form.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The zoologist or morphologist has been slow, where the physiologist has long been eager, to invoke the aid of the physical or mathematical sciences; and the reasons for this difference lie deep... Even now the zoologist has scarce begun to dream of defining in mathematical language even the simplest organic forms.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
We have come to the edge of a world of which we have no experience, and where all our preconceptions must be recast.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
To seek not for end but for antecedents is the way of the physicist, who finds "causes" in what he has learned to recognise as fundamental properties, or inseparable concomitants, or unchanging laws, of matter and of energy.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson