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.

Among men of deliberate and acute reflection, no difference of opinion can exist relative to the truth of a discovery which rests upon the basis of actual experiment.

Constantine Hering

Elephants are square animals with a leg at each corner - and a tail at both ends.

Philip Stewart Robinson

Nothing can be more shocking to reason than eternal time; infinite divisibility is not less absurd.

George Adams (1750-1795)

Among the manifold operations of living creatures few have more strongly impressed the casual observer or more deeply interested the thoughtful student than the transformations of insects.

George Herbert Carpenter

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.

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

Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity. Of all the works of the creation which know the changes of life and death, the trees of the forest have the longest existence.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

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

For what are the whales being killed? For a few hundred jobs and products that are not needed, since there are cheap substitutes. If this continues, it will be the end of living and the beginning of survival. The world is being totaled.

George Schaller

Your theory is most excellent, and I shall endeavor to collect facts for you with a view to its elucidation.

Francis Trevelyan Buckland

His sparkling conversation flowed continually, and without effort, like an exuberant Artesian well. There was no straining for effect: all was easy...

William Broderip

Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.

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

Who can say but your new Star [Uranus], which exceeds Saturn so much in its distance from the Sun, may exceed him as much in magnificence of attendance? Who knows what new rings, new satellites, or what other nameless and numberless phenomena remain behind, waiting to reward future industry and improvement?

Turkeys, quails, and small birds, are here to be seen; but birds are not numerous in desart forests; they draw near to the habitations of men, as I have constantly observed in all my travels.

William Bartram

He who is desirous of instruction ought not to disdain listening to any one, who has knowledge to communicate, however humble may be his lot, or however limited his talents.

John James Audubon

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

John Arthur Thomson

The feel of a canoe gunnel at the thigh, the splash of flying spray in the face, the rhythm of the snowshoe trail, the beckoning of far-off hills and valleys, the majesty of the tempest, the calm and silent presence of the trees that seem to muse and ponder in their silence; the trust and confidence of small living creatures, the company of simple men; these have been my inspiration and my guide. Without them I am nothing.

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

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.

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.

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)

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

Sometime afterward, a terrible misfortune occurred which was in no way calculated to allay the superstitious fears of the ignorant. As some eight or ten citizens were returning with the ferry-boat which had crossed the last Mormons over the Missouri river, into Clay county, the district selected for their new home, the craft filled with water and sunk in the middle of the current; by which accident three or four men were drowned! It was owing perhaps to the craziness of the boat, yet some persons suspected the Mormons of having scuttled it by secretly boring auger-holes in the bottom just before they had left it.