Louis Agassiz Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God's great plough.

Louis Agassiz
Never try to teach what you do not yourself know and know well.

Louis Agassiz
I confess that I was not prepared to see this theory [Darwinism] received as it has been by the best intellects of our time. Its success is greater than I could have thought possible.

Louis Agassiz
A laboratory of Natural History is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory. In David Stair Jordan

Louis Agassiz
Do not be deterred, if you have examined minutely, by any dread of being deemed extravagant. The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant, that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for nature to realize.

Louis Agassiz
Nothing is more to be deprecated than an over-appreciation of technicalities, valuing the name more highly than the thing; but some knowledge of this scientific nomenclature is necessary to every student of Nature.

Louis Agassiz
I may say that here, as in most cases where the operations of nature interfere with the designs of man, it is not by a direct intervention on our part that we may remedy the difficulties, but rather by a precise knowledge of [nature's] causes, which may enable us, if not to check, at least to avoid the evil consequences.

Louis Agassiz
A tree is known by its fruits — and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force.

Louis Agassiz
Every art and science has a language of technical terms peculiar to itself. With those terms every student must make himself familiarly acquainted at the outset; and first of all, he will desire to know the names of the objects about which he is to be engaged.

Louis Agassiz
It is my belief that naturalists are chasing a phantom, in their search after some material gradation among created beings, by which the whole Animal Kingdom may have been derived by successive development from a single germ, or from a few germs.

Louis Agassiz
The education of a naturalist now consists chiefly in learning how to compare.

Louis Agassiz
Science cannot submit to dictation, it must build up what it seeks upon the premises which it finds.

Louis Agassiz
I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me in a belief in God. A God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing point of human knowledge - adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

Louis Agassiz
The book of Nature is always open, and all that I can do or say shall be to lead young people to study that book, and not to pin their faith to any other.

Louis Agassiz
The first thing to be determined about a new specimen is not its name, but its most prominent character. Until you know an animal, care not for its name.

Louis Agassiz
He is lost, as an observer, who believes that he can, with impunity, affirm that for which he can adduce no evidence.

Louis Agassiz
Natural History must in good time become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, as well as in the inorganic world.

Louis Agassiz
Is there an investigator, who having once recognized such a similarity between certain faculties of Man and those of the higher animals, can feel prepared, in the present stage of our knowledge, to trace the limit where this community of nature ceases?

Louis Agassiz
A man cannot be a professor of zoology on one day, and of chemistry on the next, and do good work in both. As in a concert all are musicians — one plays one instrument, and one another, but none all in perfection.

Louis Agassiz
You cannot do without one specialty; you must have some base-line to measure the work and attainments of others.

Louis Agassiz
A superficial familiarity with the microscope gives no idea of the exhausting kind of labor which the naturalist must undergo who would make an intimate microscopic study of these [ovarian egg] minute living spheres.

Louis Agassiz
If you study Nature in books... when you go out of doors you cannot find her.

Louis Agassiz
Nature does not open her sanctuary without exacting due penance from her votaries.

Louis Agassiz
Facts are stupid things until brought into connection with some general law.

Louis Agassiz
It must be for truth's sake, and not even for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature.

Louis Agassiz
The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There are much more intimate relations between the earth and the living organisms which populated it, and it may even be demonstrated that the earth was developed because of them.

Louis Agassiz
As long as men inquire, they will find opportunities to know more upon these topics than those who have gone before them, so inexhaustibly rich is nature in the innermost diversity of her treasures of beauty, order and intelligence.

Louis Agassiz
The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive light, there must have been light to enter it.

Louis Agassiz
Embryology furnishes, also, the best measure of true affinities existing between animals.

Louis Agassiz
The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.

Louis Agassiz