Naturalist Quotes

Charles Darwin

Georges Cuvier

Louis Agassiz

John James Audubon

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Joseph Banks

John Muir

An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.

Nature seems to have gathered them from all the world as specimens of her rarest fountains, to show in one place what she can do.

For the book of nature has no beginning as it has no end. Open the book where you will at any point of your life, and if you have the desire to acquire knowledge, you will find it of intense interest, and no matter how long or how intently you study the pages, your interest will not flag for in nature there is no finality.

The whole science of mathematics depends upon zero. Zero alone determines the value in mathematics. Zero is in itself nothing. Mathematics is based upon nothing, and, consequently, arises out of nothing.

In the of...Things, tho' the most and ; the Peble or Flint, Cockle or Oyster-shell, Grass, Moss, Fern or Thistle, will be as, and as and sent, as any the rarest production of the Country. Only take care to choose of each the, and such as are or.

John Woodward (naturalist)

In spite of the errors into which I may have been led, the work may possibly contain ideas and arguments that will have a certain value for the advancement of knowledge, until such time as the great subjects, with which I have ventured to deal, are treated anew by men capable of shedding further light upon them.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

The city and province were given up to anarchy; the coloured people, elated with victory, proclaimed the slaughter of all whites, except the English, French, and American residents.

Henry Walter Bates

Many of the French follow a Trade with the Indians, living very conveniently for that Interest.

John Lawson (explorer)

An old medical friend gave me some excellent practical advice. He said: "You will have for some time to go much oftener down steps than up steps. Never mind! win the good opinions of washerwomen and such like, and in time you will hear of their recommendations of you to the wealthier families by whom they are employed." I did so, and found it succeed as predicted.

William Crawford Williamson

When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me.

The Kingdom of Nature is a literal Kingdom. Order and beauty, law and dependence, are seen everywhere. Amidst the great diversity of the forms of life, there is unity; and this suggests that there is one general plan, but carried out in a variety of ways.

Today I had lunch in the city with two scientists, a botanist and an ichthyologist. The botanist said he never kept a garden and the ichthyologist said he never went fishing.

Edwin Way Teale

Of all the astronomical events, the fall of a meteorite is the most unnerving and yet the most reassuring. Reassuring because it proves to us that the depths of space are inhabited by bodies made of the same elements we have here on earth, that, at rock bottom, a man and a star are built of the same stuff.

Donald Culross Peattie

The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.

Bats eat so much food each evening that they have weighed in at as much as 50 percent heavier after one night's dining.

The shore is almost noisy with the conjugation of the verb to eat in its many tenses.

John Arthur Thomson

To the more observant class of sportsmen the stay-at-home naturalist is, of necessity, indebted for most of his information with regard to the habits of large animals and their adaptation to their inanimate environment.

Richard Lydekker

Go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that. I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such, and sometimes it's hard. But you'll know it's a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It's your job to recognize them.

Natural history is the most extensive, and perhaps the most instructive and entertaining of all the sciences. It is the chief source from which human knowledge is derived. To recommend the study of it from motives of utility, were to affront the understanding of mankind.

William Smellie (encyclopedist)

One of the chief charms of collecting is its uncertainty. One day you will go out loaded down with nets and bags for the sole purpose of catching bats, and you will arrive back in camp with a python in the nets, your bags full of birds, and your pockets full of giant millipedes.

If it be so interesting to us to follow, in the infancy of our species, the almost obliterated traces of extinct nations, why should it not also be so, to search, amid the darkness of the infancy of the Earth, for the traces of revolutions which have taken place anterior to the existence of all nations?

The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.

More birds have adapted to a changing world than have failed. Very few have the narrow tolerance of the ivory-billed woodpecker or the Bachman's warbler.

Roger Tory Peterson

The flowers and ground together make so pretty a piece of tapestry, that one might be surprised to find such colouring and workmanship hid, as it were industriously, under a rock; but the works of Nature are every where well finished, and can not be otherwise than exact and beautiful in their degree.

William Borlase

A pompous ornithologist is of all characters one of the most absurd; and the solemnity of scientific pride sits ill upon him who is alternately scaling precipices and wading bogs, chasing the ptarmigan on the weatherbeaten summits of the Highland hills, and pursuing the flights of plovers along the sandy shores of our bays and estuaries.

William MacGillivray