Louis Agassiz - Nature Quotes

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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
The office of science is not to record possibilities; but to ascertain what nature does...As far as Darwinism deals with mere arguments of possibilities or even probabilities, without a basis of fact, it departs from the true scientific method and injures science, as most of the devotees of the new ism have already done.

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
Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance.

Louis Agassiz
Lay aside all conceit. Learn to read the book of nature for yourself. Those who have succeeded best have followed for years some slim thread which has once in a while broadened out and disclosed some treasure worth a life-long search.

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
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
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
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
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