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

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
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 world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.

Louis Agassiz
The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

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

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

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
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
It is not true that a slight variation among the successive offspring of the same stock goes on increasing until the difference amounts to a specific distinction. On the contrary, it is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out, or return to their type.

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

Louis Agassiz
The philosopher's stone is no more to be found in the organic than the inorganic world; and we shall seek as vainly to transform the lower animal types into the higher ones by any of our theories, as did the alchemists of old to change the baser metals into gold.

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

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
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
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
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
America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West.

Louis Agassiz
The crust of our earth is a great cemetery, where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they lived.

Louis Agassiz
I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

Louis Agassiz