Top 100 A Natural History Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
John Burroughs
#4. Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
Oliver Sacks
#5. It doesn't matter," Reagan said. "He already likes you. I think he's into the nerdy schoolgirl thing. He talks about you like you're something he found in a natural history museum.
Rainbow Rowell
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.
Chris Weedon
#9. SMALL BOY: Where do animals go when they die? SMALL GIRL: All good animals go to heaven, but the bad ones go to the Natural History Museum. - Caption to a drawing by E.H. Shepard, PUNCH, 1929 SIMON
Sarah R. Shaber
#10. 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
#11. Jesus was a human being, bound by history and the natural world; an extraordinary man, to be sure, but still a man.
Paul Verhoeven
#12. In the last eight weeks I had experienced two of the three best times of my adult life, assuming all visits to the Museum of Natural History were treated as one event. They had both been with Rosie. Was there a correlation? It was critical to find out.
Graeme Simsion
#13. It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...
H.G.Wells
#14. If you take a look at our natural history, there's always a moment where the young lion wants to challenge the older lion and, inherently, that's going to be problematic, and I don't think we're any different.
Kiefer Sutherland
#15. [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
#16. 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
#17. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history
the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
Don DeLillo
#18. Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places.
Junius Williams
#19. Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily, and this limit has taught man all through history the size of rural or urban communities.
Leon Krier
#20. Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
Theodore Roosevelt
#21. Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic.
Raymond Williams
#22. Born to be a natural artist you love or hate but can't deny
While us minions in our millions tumble into history's chasm
We might have a couple of laughs but we're still wastes of protoplasm
Jeffrey Lewis
#23. 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
#24. Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.
Charles Kellogg
#25. Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.
Jane Smiley
#26. Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
Paul Greene
#27. Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Sarah Vowell
#28. 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
#29. The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.
Fernand Leger
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
Haniel Long
#33. The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.
Anna Pavlova
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician.
Whitfield Diffie
#37. If humanity will one day grasp the importance of natural food, this will be the beginning of a new era in the history of human life; it will simply be the PARADISE.
Arshavir Ter Hovannessian
#38. I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes. It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.
Vaclav Klaus
#39. 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
#40. It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.
Sean Penn
#41. Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust.
Lawrence Millman
#42. A man who risks his life in shooting big game in order to secure good specimens for natural history collections, or to rid a district of a man-eater or other dangerous neighbor, is a sportsman in the true sense.
Robert Baden-Powell
#43. And it's not like I'm the only guy in history to ever get a hard on in a high school locker room; for a lot of guys it's just a natural reaction to the cool moist air. But the trouble is that around certain guys, I'm radically reactionary.
Huston Piner
#44. I would choose the heat above an equal degree of chill. The evidence of natural history points to a tropical origin for our species, and I believe it to be true.
Marie Brennan
#45. 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
#46. Most cowgirls are natural storytellers, their art honed by years of practice ... It serves as entertainment; it also preserves the humor and value of a unique way of life.
Teresa Jordan
#47. But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.
Edward Gibbon
#48. If you have a good story, it doesn't have to be overproduced. I want our stories to reveal the wonders of the human spirit and the richness of life in California, including its history, people, culture and natural wonders.
Huell Howser
#49. It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.
Johann Hari
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#53. Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
Emile M. Cioran
#54. Throughout history
even a hundred years ago, even fifty
it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,
Tana French
#55. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.
Daniel Walker Howe
#56. Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself
Anthony Doerr
#57. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
Hilary Kornblith
#58. A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.
Raymond Geuss
#59. And finally, for readers who find themselves wanting to know more about the living green that surrounds us, I recommend that they waste no time in getting ahold of P. A. Thomas's book Trees: Their Natural History (2000),
Hope Jahren
#60. 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
#61. There is an erroneous tendency to view empire-building by rulers from urban-agrarian kingdoms (Alexander, for example) as strategic genius, while treating nomad imperial conquests like natural disasters.
James A. Millward
#62. 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
#63. Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
Henry David Thoreau
#64. Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.
Jo Bonner
#65. And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
Nicole Krauss
#66. In going over the history of all the inventions for which history could be obtained it became more and more clear that in addition to training and in addition to extensive knowledge, a natural quality of mind was also necessary.
Reginald Fessenden
#67. I first drew the attention of my future husband when we were fourteen, on the freshman school bus for an epic field trip from Riverside, Calif. to Los Angeles, where we were taken to the L.A. Zoo as well as the Natural History Museum.
Susan Straight
#68. But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.
Jose Marti
#69. I was never surprised that they did not have a phoenix on display. There is only one phoenix at a time, of course, and while the Natural History Museum was filled with dead things, the phoenix is always alive.
Neil Gaiman
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.
Ernst Mach
#73. God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.
August Strindberg
#74. The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.
Phillip E. Johnson
#75. You cannot just quote from history and above all you cannot take it out of context, in however humorous a fashion . On the contrary history has a natural continuity which must be respected
Gottfried Bohm
#76. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.
Will Durant
#77. 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
#78. [There is an] immense advantage to be gained by ample space and appropriate surroundings in aiding the formation of a just idea of the beauty and interest of each specimen... Nothing detracts so much from the enjoyment ... from a visit to a museum as the overcrowding of the specimens exhibited.
William Henry Flower
#79. The people who read the history books tend to have a natural zeal and are alarmingly well-read.
Saul David
#80. 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
#81. Never again will we have this good a chance as we now have to find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive. It's a sweet spot in history. That's why this is such a critical time.
Sylvia Earle
#82. If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.
Bill McKibben
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.
Immanuel Kant
#87. 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
#88. To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
Albert Camus
#89. I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.
Deborah Moggach
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. When a thundering horde of drunken Vikings rush a person, it's only natural to flinch.
Krista D. Ball
#93. We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it?
Lisa Unger
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Dedication To all who now, or have ever, called Michigan home. Its natural, glimmering beauty and fascinating history had me stuck in an almost permanent daydream. It is easy to love a place with so much magic.
Alexandria V. Nolan
#98. For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.
Francis Bacon
#99. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
Edward O. Wilson
#100. Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child.
Edward O. Wilson
