Naturalist Quotes

#1. Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.

Bill Bryson

#2. The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

Asa Gray

#3. A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.

Samuel Johnson

#4. The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.

Ted Andrews

#5. To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same - follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.

Edwin Way Teale

#6. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#7. We divide the roles of mystic, doctor, therapist, artist, herbalist, naturalist, and storyteller into separate, often inimical professions. In most other societies, there was one word, one job assignment, for somebody who was all these things at once.

Martha N. Beck

#8. Given AC as a rival to naturalism, there is an additional burden of proof for a naturalist ontology that quantifies over sui generis emergent properties such as those constitutive of consciousness. After

William Lane Craig

#9. I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

Greg Graffin

#10. A man sees only what concerns him ... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

Henry David Thoreau

#11. I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

Jane Goodall

#12. Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.

Robert Wilson Lynd

#13. Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.

E. O. Wilson

#14. The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn't based on fairy tales. It's based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.

Greg Graffin

#15. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

Henry David Thoreau

#16. (where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures' intimate lives).

Marie Brennan

#17. I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched ...

Patrick O'Brian

#18. I bill myself as a naturalist because if you say you're a naturalist, it gives people a conversation point to talk about what you actually do believe in, instead of when you say you're an atheist, and it's really just a statement of what you don't believe in.

Greg Graffin

#19. Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process.

Bill Bryson

#20. In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.

Charles Darwin

#21. According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.

Phillip E. Johnson

#22. 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

#23. She attracted people to her; she had presence, an uncommon magnetism. Documenting her effect on her habitat, a naturalist would likely have compared her to a lioness: strong, sleek, and invariably surrounded by her pride.

Mohsin Hamid

#24. We find in the course of nature that though the effects be many, the principles from which they arise are commonly few and simple, and that it is the sign of an unskilled naturalist to have recourse to a different quality in order to explain every different operation.

David Hume

#25. To be a naturalist is better than to be a king.

William Beebe

#26. I don't mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn't tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better.

Greg Graffin

#27. Nowadays the field naturalist-who is usually at all points superior to the mere closet naturalist-follows a profession as full of hazard and interest as that of the explorer or of the big-game hunter in the remote wilderness.

Theodore Roosevelt

#28. American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

Frans De Waal

#29. Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

Henry David Thoreau

#30. Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.

Charles Darwin

#31. No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

Richard Owen

#32. Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:
"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again."
One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.

G.K. Chesterton

#33. It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

Gore Vidal

#34. Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

Elizabeth Blackburn

#35. A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil ... not the cross.

Greg Graffin

#36. One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

E. O. Wilson

#37. Any place that one could not leave was not large - particularly if one was a naturalist!

Elizabeth Gilbert

#38. What is absolutely certain is that the naturalist view of things is, as I have said, just a picture of the world, not a truth about the world that we can know, nor even a conviction that rests upon a secure rational foundation.

David Bentley Hart

#39. Curious anomaly, fantastic element!" said an ingenious naturalist, "in which the animal kingdom blossoms, and the vegetable does not!

Jules Verne

#40. Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.

Tim Crane

#41. I call myself a naturalist as opposed to an atheist, but there are different styles. Some people just like to be close to nature. And some people actually worship nature, which is too wishy-washy because - like a lot of religious believers - they don't depend on facts.

Greg Graffin

#42. I'm a biologist. At my core, I'm a naturalist.

Jeff Corwin

#43. Happy indeed is the naturalist: to him the seasons come round like old friends; to him the birds sing: as he walks along, the flowers stretch out from the hedges, or look up from the ground, and as each year fades away, he looks back on a fresh store of happy memories.

John Lubbock

#44. Adams looks forward to teaching his granddaughters about planting trees, noting that they already show inclination toward this and need only be encouraged in the naturalist pursuits he has found so healthy.

Paul C. Nagel

#45. Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist.

T. S. Eliot

#46. The modern naturalist must realize that in some of its branches his profession, while more than ever a science, has also become an art.

Theodore Roosevelt

#47. Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.

Timothy Egan

#48. Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

John Berger

#49. He who has seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself away from it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are keen and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both.

Konrad Lorenz

#50. Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.

Rosamund Lupton

#51. John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you'll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there's a lot of truth to that.

Tom Bodett

#52. The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes.

Robert Wilson Lynd

#53. If moral values amount to nothing but subjective phenomena of the human mind without independent meaning and existence - a position held by a variety of naturalist, positivist, and pragmatist philosophers - one never can be found lacking in light of an objective standard of moral values.

Reinhard Hutter

#54. The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.

E. O. Wilson

#55. No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define
what is a bird.

Emma Lazarus

#56. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.

Charles Darwin

#57. The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape

David Weinberger

#58. I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.

Richard Grossman

#59. The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became. I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.

Rachel Carson

#60. I'm trying to champion the naturalist's worldview and show it's not as heathen as most religious people would make it out to be.

Greg Graffin

#61. Science is the systematic classification of experience.

George Henry Lewes

#62. Things don't look hopeful for Darwinian naturalists.

Alvin Plantinga

#63. My religion is nature. That's what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

Oliver Sacks

#64. Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.

Richard Conniff

#65. No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.

Abhijit Naskar

#66. The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.

Ann Zwinger

#67. I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

Ann Zwinger

#68. John Muir, Earth - planet, Universe
[Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]

John Muir

#69. My time in the woods is time spent with a tutor on how to live.

Chris Matakas

#70. I never would've thought seeing a hundred naked people around a swimming pool would have been dullsville, but it is.

Mark Haskell Smith

#71. We made love outdoors
Without a roof, I like most,
Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.

Roman Payne