Natural History Quotes - Page 3

• 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

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• [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

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• 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

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• I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

  John Keats

  Funny, Thinking, Class

  John Keats (2009). “Selected Letters of John Keats: Revised Edition”, p.263, Harvard University Press

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• The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Women, Animal, Perfect

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.173, Courier Corporation

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780)

  John Adams

  Children, Philosophy, War

  Letter to Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780

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• To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

  Charles Babbage

  Medicine, Branches, Chemistry

  Charles Babbage (1830). “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes”, p.12

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• 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”

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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

  Nicolas Bentley

  Women, Eye, Feet

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• 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

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• Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

  Charles Lamb

  Thinking, Wife, Childhood

  Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “The Works of Charles Lamb: To which are Prefixed, His Letters, and a Sketch of His Life”, p.118

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• What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.

  Nick Cave

  Art, Taken, Thinking

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• I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

  Ernest Thompson Seton

  Believe, Science, Belief

  Ernest Thompson Seton (2007). “Wild Animals I Have Known”, p.12, Yesterday's Classics

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• The young earth-solution to reconciling the order of creation with natural history makes good exegetical and theological sense. Indeed, the overwhelming consensus of theologians up through the Reformation held to this view. I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it.

  William A. Dembski

  Strong, Views, Order

  William A. Dembski (2009). “The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World”, p.55, B&H Publishing Group

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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