Natural History quotes:

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  • But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts. -- Richard Owen
  • In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found. -- Alfred Russel Wallace
  • I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs. -- David H. Koch
  • I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being. -- Arthur Darvill
  • I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil. -- Jane Goodall
  • There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet. -- Peter Dinklage
  • It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum. -- Noah Baumbach
  • There is no counting the unsolved problems of Natural History. -- J. Arthur Thomson
  • The American Museum of Natural History is my son's absolute favorite place in the world! So we really, really, really love New York. -- Mark Teixeira
  • 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
  • Go to the source for ideas, go to the Metropolitan Museum, find your inspiration in nature, go to the Museum of Natural History, but never rely on something that someone else has done. -- Van Day Truex
  • Yes, Isaac Taylor, who has just published 'The World of Mind,' is the Isaac Taylor, author of the 'Natural History of Enthusiasm.' I dare say by this time there is a want of fatty particles in his brain. -- George Eliot
  • Prophetic of infidel times, and indicating the unsoundness of our general education, 'The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation', has started into public favour with a fair chance of poisoning the fountains of science, and sapping the foundations of religion. -- David Brewster
  • 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
  • I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake. -- Stephen Jay Gould
  • Natural history is not about producing fables. -- David Attenborough
  • I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral. -- John Burroughs
  • I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common. -- Ernest Thompson Seton
  • If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history. -- Dominic Monaghan
  • Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things. -- Jim Crace
  • Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books. -- Jim Crace
  • You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for. -- David Attenborough
  • 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
  • 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
  • The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing. -- David Attenborough
  • In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes. -- David Attenborough
  • It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them. -- Alfred Russel Wallace
  • I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge. -- Richard Dawkins
  • Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow. -- David Attenborough
  • I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked. -- Matt Ridley
  • 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
  • With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or, as he calls it, 'natural history.' -- Rachel Johnson
  • For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less. -- David Nicholls
  • History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled. -- Penelope Lively
  • Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history. -- Robert Anton Wilson
  • Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history,. -- Douglas Brinkley
  • I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters. -- John Keats
  • Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled. -- John Maynard Smith
  • History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled. -- Reinhold Niebuhr
  • Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life. -- William Irwin Thompson
  • He (Shoeless Joe Jackson) was the finest natural hitter in the history of the game. -- Ty Cobb
  • Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child." -- E. O. Wilson
  • History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between. -- Sarah Vowell
  • I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral -- John Burroughs
  • Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous. -- Barbara Ehrenreich
  • Her interest in natural history was confined to observation of the crows' feet gathering around her eyes. -- Nicolas Bentley
  • In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history. -- Sylvia Earle
  • No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. -- Stephen Jay Gould
  • Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century. -- Ernst W. Mayr
  • ...History shows that ... (people) can be deflected from their natural tendencies by artful propaganda, bogus crises, or other political trickery. -- Robert Higgs
  • Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools. -- Robert Falcon Scott
  • Jesus was a human being, bound by history and the natural world; an extraordinary man, to be sure, but still a man. -- Paul Verhoeven
  • Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. -- Derek Walcott
  • Henry David Thoreau was an oddball job quitter and ne'er-do-well who evolved into the bearded sage of literature, natural history, and civil liberties. -- Michael Sims
  • A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men. -- Henry Ward Beecher
  • Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. -- danah boyd
  • We must change the system of education and instruction. Unfortunately, history has shown us that brotherhood must be learned, when it should be natural. -- Josephine Baker
  • The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography. -- Marston Bates
  • My work since the late '80s specifically questioned what was presented as the 'natural' order of things in the history of post-war-N.Y. painting. -- Deborah Kass
  • While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life. -- Theodore Roosevelt
  • History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations. -- James Harvey Robinson
  • It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history -- Margaret Beckett
  • Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty. -- Anthony Marra
  • A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory. -- Louis Agassiz
  • The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse. -- Terry Tempest Williams
  • The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive intervals of the harmonic series. -- Nadia Boulanger
  • Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. -- Stephen Jay Gould
  • Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne. -- Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
  • Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne. -- Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
  • 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
  • In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge. -- C. V. Raman
  • The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress. -- Michael E. DeBakey
  • 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
  • In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • 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
  • Biology can be divided into the study of proximate causes, the study of the physiological sciences (broadly conceived), and into the study of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, the subject of natural history. -- Ernst Mayr
  • The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides. -- Marston Bates
  • [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds. -- Stephen Jay Gould
  • 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
  • When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. -- Charles Darwin
  • All over the planet, nature is being transformed into 'un-nature' at breakneck speed...My life is part of natural history. I long to know where that history came from and where it is going. -- Hiroshi Sugimoto
  • 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
  • War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated. -- Ruth Benedict
  • Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking. -- W. H. Auden
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