Jean Henri Fabre Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

I have made it a rule to adopt the method of ignorance in my investigations into instincts. I read very little.... I know nothing. So much the better : my queries will be all the freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the lights obtained.

Jean Henri Fabre
In many cases, ignorance is a good thing : the mind retains its freedom of investigation and does not stray along roads that lead nowhither, suggested by one's reading. I have experienced this once again.... Yes, ignorance can have its advantages; the new is found far from the beaten track.

Jean Henri Fabre
But what is the use of this history, what the use of all this minute research? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people face to face intent upon one another's extermination. The insect does not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves.

Jean Henri Fabre
The Spider has a bad name: to most of us, she represents an odious, noxious animal, which every one hastens to crush under foot. Against this summary verdict the observer sets the beast's industry, its talent as a weaver, its wiliness in the chase, its tragic nuptials and other characteristics of great interest.

Jean Henri Fabre
Dear insects, my study of you has sustainned me and continues to sustain me in my heaviest trials. I must take leave of you for to-day. The ranks are thinning around me and the long hopes have fled. Shall I be able to speak of you again?

Jean Henri Fabre
The network of ideas remains and forms as it were a moving cobweb in which repose wriggles and tosses, incapable of finding a stable equilibrium.

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
How many properties were there of which the compass knew nothing, how many cunning laws lay contained in embryo within an equation, the mysterious nut which must be artistically cracked to extract the rich kernel, the theorem!

Jean Henri Fabre
Amid the ruins that surround me, one strip of wall remains standing, immovable upon its solid base: my passion for scientific truth.

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
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
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
Algebra, the poem of order, has magnificent flights. I look upon its formulae, its strophes as superb, without feeling at all astonished when others do not agree.

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
Palaeontology calls him Carcharodon meglodon. Our modern Shark, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as a dwarf can give an idea of a giant.

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
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