Buffon quotes:

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Montesquieu had the style of a genius; Buffon, the genius of style. -- Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm
Buffon is a gentleman thinking only of the ball [after Gianluigi Buffon's strong tackle on Andy Carroll during a friendly with Newcastle -- Claudio Ranieri
Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk." -- Santiago Ramon y Cajal
There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century. -- Ernst W. Mayr
"Genius is just enduring patience," said Buffon. This is far from complete. Genius is impatience in ideas and patience with the facts: a lively imagination and a calm judgment, rather like a liquid boiling in a cup that remains cold. -- Leo Errera
My father... never required me to study anything, but he knew how to inspire in me a great desire for knowledge. Before learning to read, my greatest pleasure was to listen to passages from Buffon's natural history. I constantly requested him to read me the history of animals and birds... -- Andre-Marie Ampere
Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. -- Thomas Jefferson
We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction. -- Oliver Goldsmith

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