Top 100 History Of Life Quotes
#1. In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.
Stephen Jay Gould
#2. The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#3. Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
#4. The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#5. The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.
Robert T. Bakker
#6. No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.
Richard Preston
#7. The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
James Gleick
#8. There is no such thing as a criminal life. Life is life, and life is criminalized. No one ever, in the history of life, has chosen a criminal life. No one has ever said, 'I want to be a criminal.' No one ever has done that.
Rhys Ifans
#9. If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
Stephen Jay Gould
#10. And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.
Niles Eldredge
#11. All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life
David Attenborough
#13. The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.
E. O. Wilson
#14. The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.
Nathan Wolfe
#15. Man is the only mammal whose normal method of locomotion is to walk on two legs. A pattern of mammal behavior that emerges only once in the whole history of life on earth takes a great deal of explaining.
Elaine Morgan
#16. Bought the Vegematic and Pocket Fisherman, too, illuminated illustrated history of Life, and Boxcar Willie.
Steve Goodman
#17. To know the brain ... is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
#18. The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.
Stephen Jay Gould
#19. The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#20. Each of us play a unique role in the history of life. What legacy do you want to live behind?
Lailah Gifty Akita
#21. In the history of life, no good news has followed that sentence ["We have to talk."].
Paul Reiser
#22. 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
#23. The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
Salman Rushdie
#24. If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that's the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among the most dramatic and important events in the whole history of life on earth.
Nick Lane
#25. The coming week in The Hague may prove to be one of the most important in the three-and-a-half-billion year history of life on earth.
Tony Juniper
#26. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#27. To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#28. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#29. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.
Anna Quindlen
#30. No, my degree was history, not the practice of art! I can't draw to save my life you know.
Emma Anderson
#31. The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.
Robert Kennedy
#32. Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both. Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.
George R R Martin
#33. HISTORY IS the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.
Leo Tolstoy
#34. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#35. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."
Ronald Reagan
#36. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.
Terry Eagleton
#37. Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.
Seth Lloyd
#38. In a day and age when, unfortunately, so few write letters or keep a diary any longer, the Wright Papers stand as a striking reminder of a time when that was not the way and of the immense value such writings can have in bringing history to life.
David McCullough
#39. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...
A.S. Byatt
#40. War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget.
Robert Graff
#42. Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history.
William S. Burroughs
#43. I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#44. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#45. If someone deprives you of history deprives you of your future
Thabiso Monkoe
#46. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#47. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#48. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#49. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
#50. If given a chance, I would really want to explore the monuments in Delhi, like Qutub Minar and the forts. I have been there as a child, but now I want to go back and understand the history and significance behind them. We take all of these things for granted in life.
Shreya Ghoshal
#52. The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.
Benjamin Tucker
#53. Our personal history does not inhibit our present or our future. Don't let anyone (including yourself) tell you you can't do something. Find your passion and take action everyday to work towards achieving your life purpose.
Miya Yamanouchi
#54. In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.
Megan Smolenyak
#55. Children don't heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history. Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.
Albert Einstein
#56. I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.
Garth Greenwell
#57. Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.
Agnes Repplier
#58. Just touching that old tree was truly moving to me because when you touch these trees, you have such a sense of the passage of time, of history. It's like you're touching the essence, the very substance of life.
Kim Novak
#59. The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around. Nonetheless, the early universe still had the right stuff for life, and contained worlds that were just as suitable for spawning biology and intelligence as our own.
Seth Shostak
#60. I care about Roger Sterling, one of the most subtle and amazing characters in dramatic history [Mad men]. This guys who knows precisely who he is, yet leaves us time after time hoping desperately for him to finally grab control of his life and some responsibility for those around him.
Chris Matthews
#61. If history remembers me at all, in any way, I hope it will be as a man who loved the Land of Israel and watched over it in every way he could, all his life.
Yitzhak Shamir
#62. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.
Will Durant
#63. Sometimes people have too much history together, history of the wrong kind, and people cannot tear pages from the book of their life. Once something is written there it is permanent.
Ryan David Jahn
#64. When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.
Dick Pirozzolo
#65. I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life.
Mike Mills
#66. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#67. Love is eternal. It has been the strongest motivation for human actions throughout history. Love is stronger than life. It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death.
Vera Caspary
#68. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.
Sally Armstrong
#69. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
#70. After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.
Ronald C. White Jr.
#71. John Hay points to our our history of getting lost in suffering when, "so close together were pain and antidote.
John Taliaferro
#72. Violence is the most elemental truth of life. It's the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way.
James Carlos Blake
#73. If anybody had a sense of history, it wasn't me, I'll tell you that. I, I was just enjoying life and, and making a living and, and, you know, listening to all this good music. No, there was never in my mind any kind of sense of history, nothing.
Cosimo Matassa
#74. I understand people, and I think that my life and my history and what I represent can relate to a lot of the women, the independents, the moderate voters.
Mia Love
#75. The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.
David Lloyd-Jones
#76. We have not invaded anyone. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#77. Oh how nice!" the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice & all. "I must tell Ernest we met," she said. "May I ask your name, dear?"
"Rudolf Schmidt," I told her. I didn't feel like giving her my whole life history. Rudolf Schmidt was the name of the janitor of our dorm.
J.D. Salinger
#78. The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
John Updike
#79. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
Chris Marker
#80. Life is conflict; peace is death. Forces of chaos keep the cycles of history moving.
Jack Donovan
#81. There had been a time in Godfrey's life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.
George MacDonald
#82. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#83. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#84. The history of a place fascinates me through the echoes and remains you learn alot
D.B. Shultz
#85. The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
Roland Barthes
#86. Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.
Louis Kronenberger
#87. What a thrill it was to play opposite Maurice Evans in this brilliant, dazzling musical, based on the life of two of the greatest personalities in stage history.
Dinah Sheridan
#88. 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
#89. The difference in the past and history is that the past is set in stone history is just an account from the guy with the strongest axe
Andy Andrews
#90. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#91. A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. - Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997
Tom Standage
#92. Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.
A. N. Wilson
#93. For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.
Rachel Holmes
#94. Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.
Albert Schweitzer
#95. I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting, I read books, I sang songs of history, And today I've come home to Cold Mountain To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
Hanshan
#96. That's what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar ... Because there's more past than present there. Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?
Kamila Shamsie
#97. Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
Alice Miller
#98. The course of George St. Leger Grenfell's life was a continuing act of violence against the sanctities of Victorian life, and especially against its inmost essence, the family. And indeed, the large Grenfell family was an overpowering aggregation, even by the ample Victorian standard.
Stephen Z. Starr
#99. The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher's eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner's lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
Anna Myers
#100. History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
Bill Watterson
