Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

Man is condemned to exhaust all possible errors when he examines any set of facts before he recognizes the truth.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Imagination is one of the finest faculties of man: it ennobles and elevates his thoughts and relieves him from the domination of minute details; and when it reaches a very high development, it makes him superior to the great majority of other people.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
In spite of the errors into which I may have been led, the work may possibly contain ideas and arguments that will have a certain value for the advancement of knowledge, until such time as the great subjects, with which I have ventured to deal, are treated anew by men capable of shedding further light upon them.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
All known living bodies are sharply divided into two special kingdoms, based upon the essential differences which distinguish animals from plants, and in spite of what has been said, I am convinced that these two kingdoms do not really merge into one another at any point.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
It is not the organs—that is, the character and form of the animal's bodily parts—that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Induction, analogy, hypotheses founded upon facts and rectified continually by new observations, a happy tact given by nature and strengthened by numerous comparisons of its indications with experience, such are the principal means for arriving at truth.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Life, in a body whose order and state of affairs can make it manifest, is assuredly, as I have said, a real power that gives rise to numerous phenomena. This power has, however, neither goal nor intention. It can do only what it does; it is only a set of acting causes, not a particular being. I was the first to establish this truth at a time when life was still thought to be a principle, an archeia, a being of some sort.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
We must then be guided everywhere by natural affinities in composing the groups which result by dividing each kingdom into classes, each class into orders, each order into sections or families, each family into genera, and each genus into different species if there is occasion for it.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Education is the science of knowing TRUTH. Miseducation is the art of absorbing FALSITY. TRUTH is that which is, not that which ain't. FALSITY is that which ain't, not that which is.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Reason is not a faculty; still less is it a torch or entity of any kind; but it is a special condition of the individual's intellectual faculties; a condition that is altered by experience, gradually improves and controls the judgments, according as the individual exercises his intellect.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
What a swarm of mollusk shells are furnished by every country and every sea, eluding our means of distinction and draining our resources.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Time is insignificant and never a difficulty for Nature. It is always at her disposal and represents an unlimited power with which she accomplishes her greatest and smallest tasks.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Both individual and public reason, when they find themselves exposed to any alteration, usually set up so great an obstacle to it, that it is often harder to secure the recognition of a truth than it is to discover it.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
One must believe that every living thing whatsoever must change insensibly in its organization and in its form...One must therefore never expect to find among living species all those which are found in the fossil state, and yet one may not assume that any species has really been lost or rendered extinct.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
The most important discoveries of the laws, methods and progress of Nature have nearly always sprung from the examination of the smaller objects which she contains.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
How great has been the progress of natural science since serious attention began to be given to affinities, and especially since their true underlying principles have been determined!

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
It is not enough to discover and prove a useful truth previously unknown, but that it is necessary also to be able to propagate it and get it recognized.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plant is situated.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck