Natural History Quotes - Page 2

• Birds, it must be admitted, are the most exciting and most deserving of the vertebrates; they are perhaps the best entre into the study of natural history, and a very good wedge into conservation awareness.

  Roger Tory Peterson

  Bird, Study, Awareness

  14 Copy quote

• Rumour has it that the gardens of natural history museums are used for surreptitious burial of those intermediate forms between species which might disturb the orderly classifications of the taxonomist.

  David Lack

  Science, Garden, Museums

  David Lack (1947). “Darwin's Finches”, p.23, CUP Archive

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

  Murray Bookchin

  Spring, Ocean, Journey

  29 Copy quote

• Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.

  Robert Falcon Scott

  School, Boys, Games

  Last letter to his wife, in 'Scott's Last Expedition' (1913) vol. 1, ch. 20

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Beyond natural history Other biological sciences take up the study at other levels of organization: dissecting the individual into organs and tissues and seeing how these work together, as in physiology; reaching down still further to the level of cells, as in cytology; and reaching the final biological level with the study of living molecules and their interactions, as in biochemistry. No one of these levels can be considered as more important than any other.

  Marston Bates

  Science, Cells, Organization

  4 Copy quote

• Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

  William Irwin Thompson

  History Of Life, Fairy Tale, Natural

  4 Copy quote

• A wise and well-informed humanist has taken the time to look lovingly and wonderingly at the living world around him, and to study the ways in which scientists have tried to analyze the world... THE BEST INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL HISTORY THAT HAS YET BEEN WRITTEN.

  Marston Bates

  Wise, Taken, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

  Marston Bates

  Mean, Science, Animal

  4 Copy quote

• Her interest in natural history was confined to observation of the crows' feet gathering around her eyes.

  Nicolas Bentley

  Women, Eye, Feet

  10 Copy quote

• Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Hero, Artist, Blood

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, p. 5, 1930.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We the undersigned, intend to establish an instruction and training institution which differs from the common elementary schools principally in that it will embrace, outside of (in addition to) the general and elementary curriculum, all branches of the classical high school, which are necessary for a true Christian and scientific education, such as: Religion, the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and English languages; History, Geography, Mathematics, Physics, natural history, Introduction to Philosophy, Music, and Drawing.

  C. F. W. Walther

  Christian, Philosophy, Latin

  12 Copy quote

• If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.

  A. A. Gill

  Science, Museums, Order

  A.A. Gill (2008). “Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There”, p.80, Simon and Schuster

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

  Charles Darwin (1902). “Charles Darwin: His Life in an Autobiographical Chapter and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters”, p.267, Library of Alexandria

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

  David Attenborough

  Travel, Animal, Order

  8 Copy quote

• Yet man does recognise himself [as an animal]. But I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history, I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Science, Animal, Men

  44 Copy quote

• what are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Philosophy, Educational, Italian

  4 Copy quote

• we defer therefore till this time twelve month to avail ourselves of the instruction of that place, and particularly of your kindness in the two branches of Botany and Natural history to which we wish him particularly to apply.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Kindness, Educational, Two

  5 Copy quote

• [Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.

  John Burroughs

  Knowledge, Science, Thinking

  9 Copy quote

• Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

  John Maynard Smith

  Evolution, Mathematics, Natural

  John Maynard Smith (1988). “Games, sex and evolution”, Prentice Hall

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

  Thomas Huxley

  Education, Country, Art

  Thomas H. Huxley (1900). “A Library of Universal Literature in Four Parts, Comprising Science, Biography, Fiction and the Great Orations”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The knowledge of Natural-History, being Observation of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most others, and in my slender Opinion, less subject to Mistakes than Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions are; ... These are things we are sure of, so far as our Senses are not fallible; and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them.

  Hans Sloane

  Mistake, Knowledge, Science

  5 Copy quote

• In order to turn natural history into a true science, one would have to devote oneself to investigations capable of telling us not the particular shape of such and such an animal, but the general procedures of nature in the animal's production and preservation.

  Pierre Louis Maupertuis

  Science, Animal, Order

  11 Copy quote

• From my earliest childhood I nourished and cherished the desire to make a creditable journey in a new country, and write such a respectable account of its natural history as should give me a niche amongst the scientific explorers of the globe I inhabit, and hand my name down as a useful contributor of original matter.

  Joseph Dalton Hooker

  Country, Writing, Science

  7 Copy quote

• I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.

  Prince Philip

  Animal, Boys, Games

  9 Copy quote

• To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Writing, Science, Clothes

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (2015). “The Phenomenon of Man”, p.111, Lulu Press, Inc

  8 Copy quote

  Show source