Naturalist Quotes

If it be granted that making discoveries is one of the most satisfactory of human pleasures, then we may without hesitation affirm, that the study of insects is one of the most delightful branches of natural history, for it affords peculiar facilities for its pursuit.

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.

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

Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth; it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.

Roy Chapman Andrews

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

The question "How many legs does a normal man have?" should be answered by finding a statistical average. And since some men have only one leg, or none, this would lead inevitably to the conclusion that a "normal" man is equipped with one and some fraction legs.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Learn to use an axe, and respect it and you can't help but love it. But abuse one and it will wear your hands raw and open your foot like an overcooked sausage.

Richard Proenneke

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

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.

Greater numbers dig their graves with their own teeth, and die more by those fatal instruments than the weapons of their enemies.

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

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

The vast ice-engine that we call a glacier is almost as silent as the slumbering rocks, and, to all but the eye of science, nearly as immobile, save where it discharges into the sea. It is noisy in its dying, but in the height of its power it is as still as the falling snow of which it is made.

Even if a scientific model, like a car, has only a few years to run before it is discarded, it serves its purpose for getting from one place to another.

David B. Wingate

The naturalists of yore esteemed the ocean to be a treasury of wonders, and sought therein for monstrosities and organisms contrary to the law of nature, such as they interpreted it.

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

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

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

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)

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.