William Beebe Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

These descents of mine beneath the sea seemed to partake of a real cosmic character. First of all there was the complete and utter loneliness and isolation, a feeling wholly unlike the isolation felt when removed from fellow men by mere distance …. It was a loneliness more akin to a first venture upon the moon or Venus than that from a plane in mid-ocean or a stance on Mount Everest: no whit more wonderful than these feats, but different.

William Beebe
The isness of things is well worth studying; but it is their whyness that makes life worth living.
These words should be ready for instant use by every honest scientist➖ 'I don't know.'

William Beebe
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

William Beebe
The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man.

William Beebe
A first walk in any new country is one of the things which makes life on this planet worth being grateful for.

William Beebe
A male firefly blazes his trail through the woods. At last he perceives a dim inconspicuous gleam, a mere spark, but it is his LANDING BEACON and he levels off and steers straight for the wingless mate, who has laboriously climbed to the top of a fern and there hung out her signal...

William Beebe
Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had shifted to rocks.

William Beebe
Scientific facts, more often than is known, are learned by accident.

William Beebe
There are many ways of considering a flatworm. A Creator might rightly be quoted, "He saw that it was good." To an ant accidentally blundering into its slime, the worm would be a certain, evil death. A bird would give it no second glance for its flesh is worse than inedible.

William Beebe
Having an I.Q. in mathematics lower than would be thought possible in any human being alive, my mind is always excited at any simple kindergarten problems.

William Beebe
To write honestly and with conviction anything about the migration of birds, one should oneself have migrated. Somehow or other we should dehumanize ourselves, feel the feel of feathers on our body and wind in our wings, and finally know what it is to leave abundance and safety and daylight and yield to a compelling instinct, age-old, seeming at the time quite devoid of reason and object.

William Beebe
There was the ending still unfinished, the finale buried in the future — and in this we find the fascination of Nature and Science.

William Beebe
When once it has been seen, it will remain forever the most vivid memory in life, solely because of its cosmic chill and isolation, the eternal and absolute darkness and the indescribable beauty of its inhabitants.

William Beebe