Jean Henri Fabre Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

I make bold to take the chalk in hand myself, to seize the rudder of our algebraical boat. I comment on the book, interpret it in my own fashion, expound the text, sound the reefs until daylight comes and leads us to the haven of the solution.

Jean Henri Fabre
Their [the cricket] song is a monotonous and artless, but well suited in its very lack of art to the simple gladness of reviving life. It is the hosanna of the awakening, the sacred alleluia understood by swelling seed and sprouting blade.

Jean Henri Fabre
Coming from every direction and appraised I know not how, here are forty lovers eager to pay their respects to the marriageable bride born that morning.

Jean Henri Fabre
The spider's web is a glorious mathematical problem.

Jean Henri Fabre
True, it [geometry] does not bestow imagination, a delicate flower blossoming none knows how and unable to thrive on every soil; but it arranges what is confused, thins out the dense, calms the tumultuous, filters the muddy and gives lucidity, a superior product to all the tropes of rhetoric.

Jean Henri Fabre
'Twas a tiny grain at first, an insignificant ball rolling and increasing as it went. From one slope to the other of the theorems, it grew to a heavy mass; and the mass became a mighty projectile which, flung backwards and retracing its course, split the darkness and spread it into one vast sheet of light.

Jean Henri Fabre
The prehistoric animal is first and foremost an atrocious machine for grabbing, with a stomach for digesting.

Jean Henri Fabre
Air, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbonic-acid gas, and carbon monoxide are gases that not even the sharpest eyes can see; and most other gases are of like character in this respect, so that gases as a class are thought of by us as invisible. Now, however, we have a gas that is as subtle and impalpable as the others and yet can be seen very well.

Jean Henri Fabre
The logarithmic spiral of the mollusc is as old as the centuries. It proceeds from the Sovran Geometry Which rules the world, attentive alike to the Wasp's cell and to the Snail's spiral.

Jean Henri Fabre
Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Jean Henri Fabre
Let us turn elsewhere, to the wasps and bees, who unquestionably come first in the laying up of a heritage for their offspring.

Jean Henri Fabre
I find myself confronted with a subject which is not only highly interesting, but somewhat difficult: not that the subject is obscure; but it presupposes in the reader a certain knowledge of geometry: a strong meat too often neglected.

Jean Henri Fabre
The observer must neglect nothing: he never knows what the humblest fact may bring forth.

Jean Henri Fabre
There was nothing to be said about addition and subtraction: they were so simple as to force themselves upon one at first sight. Multiplication spoilt things. There was a certain rule of signs which declared that minus multiplied by minus made plus. How I toiled over that wretched paradox!

Jean Henri Fabre
Few insects enjoy more fame than the Glow-worm, the curious little animal who celebrates the joy of life by lighting a lantern at its tail-end. We all know it, at least by name, even if we have not seen it roaming through the grass, like a spark fallen from the full moon.

Jean Henri Fabre
Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.

Jean Henri Fabre
You understand, because you succeed in making another understand.

Jean Henri Fabre
The Sacred beetle never chooses any shape but the sphere, though it necessitates such scrupulous accuracy; she acts as though she knew the laws of evaporation and geometry from beginning to end.

Jean Henri Fabre
Hunting for ideas troubles the brain even more than hunting for the roots of an equation.

Jean Henri Fabre
An error removed is tantamount to a truth gained...

Jean Henri Fabre
The trained mind, alone, more discerning than our retina, sees clearly that which defies the perceptive faculties of the eye.

Jean Henri Fabre
From the least to the greatest in the zoological progression, the stomach sways the world; the data supplied by food are chief among all the documents of life.

Jean Henri Fabre
There are no masters nor apprentices in their [spiders] guild; all know their craft from the moment that the first thread is laid.

Jean Henri Fabre
The Grasshopper tribe has its bursts of gladness; it has moreover the advantage of being able to express them with a sound, the simple satisfaction of the artist.

Jean Henri Fabre
The best thing is to say good-bye, not without a certain regret on my part. One of these days. I will take you and scatter you in your territory, the rock-strewn slope where the sun is so hot.... There you will learn the hard struggle for life better than you would with me.

Jean Henri Fabre