Top 100 Quotes About Natural History
#1. 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
#2. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.
Ernst W. Mayr
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
#9. [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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.
Richard Fortey
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats
#16. 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
#17. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#18. 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
#19. Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.
Robert Falcon Scott
#20. There is no counting the unsolved problems of Natural History.
J. Arthur Thomson
#21. 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
#22. Her interest in natural history was confined to observation of the crows' feet gathering around her eyes.
Nicolas Bentley
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
John Burroughs
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
Gilbert White
#33. My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.
Michael Pollan
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again - finally turning into an expectation - then theories are overturned.
Stephen Jay Gould
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Here's the story of how Pluto lost its planetary status and was demoted to an ice ball in the outer solar system. It's also about my role in this at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here? We must bear witness.
Joni L. James
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. The good news was that "biology" turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way "art history" would at the Met or "trust fund" at the MoMA.
Sloane Crosley
#56. Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history ... You spoil both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. The study of taxonomy in its broadest sense is probably the oldest branch of biology or natural history as well as the basis for all the other branches, since the first step in obtaining any knowledge of things about us is to discriminate between them and to learn to recognize them.
Richard E. Blackwelder
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. We defer therefore till this time twelve month to avail ourselves of the instruction of that place, and particularly of your kindness in the two branches of Botany and Natural history to which we wish him particularly to apply.
Thomas Jefferson
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,
when did burdock and plantain sprout first?
Henry David Thoreau
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.
Ernest Thompson Seton
#73. Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.
John Maynard Smith
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child.
Edward O. Wilson
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#91. The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.
James Hutton
#92. 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
#94. I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.
Frances Burney
#95. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
#96. Jesus was a human being, bound by history and the natural world; an extraordinary man, to be sure, but still a man.
Paul Verhoeven
#97. Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.
Louise J. Kaplan
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Nothing is more clear than that Christ cannot be explained by any humanistic system. He does not fit into any theory of natural evolution, for in that case the perfect flower of humanity should have appeared at the end of human history and not in the middle of it.
Loraine Boettner
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