Top 25 Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon Quotes
#1. Only those works which are well-written will pass to posterity: the amount of knowledge, the uniqueness of the facts, even the novelty of the discoveries are no guarantees of immortality ... These things are exterior to a man but style is the man himself.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#2. Let us suppose, that the Old and New worlds were formerly but one continent, and that, by a violent earthquake, the ancient Atalantis [sic] of Plato was sunk ... The sea would necessarily rush in from all quarters, and form what is now called the Atlantic ocean.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#4. Although the works of the Creator may be in themselves all equally perfect, the animal is, as I see it, the most complete work of nature, and man is her masterpiece.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#5. All the work of the crystallographers serves only to demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where they suppose uniformity ... that in nature there is nothing absolute, nothing perfectly regular.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#6. Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#7. He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#8. In Ireland, there are the same fossils, the same shells and the same sea bodies, as appear in America, and some of them are found in no other part of Europe.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#9. The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the germs of its production.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#10. Ignorance produced genera, and science produced, and will continue to produce, proper names; nor of these shall we be afraid to increase the number, whenever we shall have occasion to denote different species.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#12. Let us investigate more closely this property common to animal and plant, this power of producing its likeness, this chain of successive existences of individuals, which constitutes the real existence of the species.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#22. I am convinced, by repeated observation, that marbles, lime-stones, chalks, marls, clays, sand, and almost all terrestrial substances, wherever situated, are full of shells and other spoils of the ocean.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#23. The discoveries that one can make with the microscope amount to very little, for one sees with the mind's eye and without the microscope the real existence of all these little beings.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
