Gilbert White Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

When I hear now and then of an abandoned mother that destroys her offspring, I am not so much amazed; since reason perverted, and the bad passions let loose, are capable of any enormity.

Gilbert White
It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.

Gilbert White
Nature, who is a great economist, converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another.

Gilbert White
The standing objection to botany has always been that it is a pursuit that amuses the fancy and exercises the memory, without improving the mind or advancing any real knowledge: and where the science is carried no farther than a mere systematic classification, the charge is but too true.

Gilbert White
A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air [manner] as well as by their colours and shape; on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand.

Gilbert White
To a thinking mind nothing is more wonderful than that early instinct which impresses young animals with the notion of the situation of their natural weapons, and of using them properly in their own defense, even before those weapons subsist or are formed.

Gilbert White
The earth without worms would soon become cold, hardbound, and void of fermentation; and consequently sterile.

Gilbert White
They who write on natural history cannot too frequently advert to instinct, that wonderful limited faculty, which, in some instances, raises the brute creation as it were above reason, and in others leaves them so far below it.

Gilbert White
Vegetation is highly worthy of our attention; and in itself is of the utmost consequence to mankind, and productive of many of the greatest comforts and elegancies of life.

Gilbert White
The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.

Gilbert White