Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Botanists

If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.

No matter how widely you have travelled, you haven't seen the world if you have failed to look into the human hearts that inhabit it.

The great seal of truth is simplicity.

All I ever aim to do is to put the Development hypothesis in the same coach as the creation one. It will only be a question of who is to ride outside & who in after all.

...the avocado is a food without rival among the fruits, the veritable fruit of paradise

If delight may provoke men's labour, what greater delights is there then to behold the earth as apparelled with plants, as with a robe of imbroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? The delight is great but the use greater, and joyned often with necessitie.

The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.

Of these three essential factors, space might be said to be one with which biogeography is primarily concerned. However space necessarily interplays with time and form, therefore the three factors are as one of biogeographic concern.

I am fully conscious that a complete presentation of the regions visited is a task beyond my power. All I can strive to do is convey an illusion-my own illusion

If God exists He must be manifest somehow in matter, and His ways are what science is discovering.

Be purity of life the test, leave to the heart, to heaven the rest.

This constitution we designate by the word genotype. The word is entirely independent of any hypothesis; it is fact, not hypothesis that different zygotes arising by fertilisation can thereby have different qualities, that, even under quite similar conditions of life, phenotypically diverse individuals can develop.

No biologist has actually seen the origin by evolution of a major group of organisms.

We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.

I thought that I had found something new. But then I convinced myself that the Abbot Gregor Mendel in Brünn, had, during the sixties, not only obtained the same result through extensive experiments with peas, which lasted for many years, as did de Vries and I, but had also given exactly the same explanation, as far as that was possible in 1866.

In its most primitive form, life is, therefore, no longer bound to the cell, the cell which possesses structure and which can be compared to a complex wheel-work, such as a watch which ceases to exist if it is stamped down in a mortar. No, in its primitive form life is like fire, like a flame borne by the living substance;-like a flame which appears in endless diversity and yet has specificity within it;-which can adopt the form of the organic world, of the lank grass-leaf and of the stem of the tree.

If we wish for mercy ourselves, we must show mercy to all dumb animals.

Successful entrepreneurs judge correctly the need for change, then do something about it.

Doubtless many can recall certain books which have greatly influenced their lives, and in my own case one stands out especially-a translation of Hofmeister's epoch-making treatise on the comparative morphology of plants. This book, studied while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, was undoubtedly the most important factor in determining the trend of my botanical investigation for many years.

Yet man does recognise himself [as an animal]. But I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history, I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science.

Linnea.... A plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space - from Linnaeus who resembles it.

I have often started off on a walk in the state called mad-mad in the sense of sore-headed, or mad with tedium or confusion; I have set forth dull, null and even thoroughly discouraged. But I never came back in such a frame of mind, and I never met a human being whose humor was not the better for a walk.

Make sure you want it enough.

...after my first feeling of revulsion had passed, I spent three of the most entertaining and instructive weeks of my life studying the fascinating molds which appeared one by one on the slowly disintegrating mass of horse-dung. Microscopic molds are both very beautiful and absorbingly interesting. The rapid growth of their spores, the way they live on each other, the manner in which the different forms come and go, is so amazing and varied that I believe a man could spend his life and not exhaust the forms or problems contained in one plate of manure.

After a greater or lesser number of generations the mutants are eliminated.

According to the Spanish proverb, four persons are wanted to make a good salad: a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a counsellor for salt and a madman to stir it all up.

I never think it necessary to repeat calumnies; they are sparks, which, if you do not blow them, will go out of themselves.

Time is not money; time is an opportunity to live before you die. So a man who walks, and lives and sees and thinks as he walks, has lengthened his life.

In natural science the principles of truth ought to be confirmed by observation.

The first thing you should do when you get up is read the obituaries. You never know when you'll see a name that will just make your day.

Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow live and feel.

All the species recognized by Botanists came forth from the Almighty Creator's hand, and the number of these is now and always will be exactly the same, while every day new and different florists' species arise from the true species so-called by Botanists, and when they have arisen they finally revert to the original forms. Accordingly to the former have been assigned by Nature fixed limits, beyond which they cannot go: while the latter display without end the infinite sport of Nature.

Never to have seen anything but the temperate zone is to have lived on the fringe of the world. Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer live the majority of all the plant species, the vast majority of the insects, most of the strange ... quadrupeds, all of the great and most of the poisonous snakes and large lizards, most of the brilliantly colored sea fishes, and the strangest and most gorgeously plumaged of the birds.

A disease which new and obscure to you, Doctor, will be known only after death; and even then not without an autopsy will you examine it with exacting pains. But rare are those among the extremely busy clinicians who are willing or capable of doing this correctly.

The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.

In the gametes of an individual hybrid the Anlagen for each individual parental character are found in all possible combinations but never in a single gamete the Anlagen for a pair of characters. Each combination occurs with approximately the same frequency.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

It is not God, but people themselves who shorten their lives by not keeping physically fit.

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

Let us suppose that we have laid on the table... [a] piece of glass... and let us homologize this glass to a whole order of plants or birds. Let us hit this glass a blow in such a manner as but to crack it up. The sectors circumscribed by cracks following the first blow may here be understood to represent families. Continuing, we may crack the glass into genera, species and subspecies to the point of finally having the upper right hand corner a piece about 4 inches square representing a sub-species.

To live by medicine is to live horribly.

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

For keenest enjoyment, I visit when the dew is on them, or in cloudy weather, or when the rain is falling: and I must be alone or with someone who cares for them as I do.

Yes, social friend, I love thee well, In learned doctor's spite; Thy clouds all other clouds dispel And lap me in delight.

Generation by male and female is a law common to animals and plants.

I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them, and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of plants themselves.

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none.

All the great naturalists have been habitual walkers, for no laboratory, no book, car, train or plane takes the place of honest footwork for this calling, be it amateur's or professional's.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

...the need for a garden of rare palms and vines and ornamental trees and shrubs which would be near enough to a growing city to form a quiet place where children with their elders could peer, as it were, into those fascinating jungles and palm glades of the tropics which have for generations stimulated the imaginations of American youth.

A great teacher is not simply one who imparts knowledge to his students, but one who awakens their interest in it and makes them eager to pursue it for themselves. He is a spark plug, not a fuel pipe. The reason colleges exist is to bring students into contact with contagious personalities, for otherwise they might as well be correspondance schools.

A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discovers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.

A thing is either alive or it isn’t; there is nothing that is almost alive. There is but the remotest possibility of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, and every likelihood that Arrhenius is right when he dares to claim that life is a cosmic phenomenon, something that drifts between the spheres, like light, and like light transiently descends upon those fit to receive it.

Of what use are the great number of petrifactions, of different species, shape and form which are dug up by naturalists? Perhaps the collection of such specimens is sheer vanity and inquisitiveness. I do not presume to say; but we find in our mountains the rarest animals, shells, mussels, and corals embalmed in stone, as it were, living specimens of which are now being sought in vain throughout Europe. These stones alone whisper in the midst of general silence.

Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury—you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.

Plants, in a state of nature, are always warring with one another, contending for the monopoly of the soil,-the stronger ejecting the weaker,-the more vigorous overgrowing and killing the more delicate. Every modification of climate, every disturbance of the soil, every interference with the existing vegetation of an area, favours some species at the expense of others.

There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will find that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.

The onion being eaten, yea though it be boyled, causeth head-ache, hurteth the eyes, and maketh a man dimme sighted, dulleth the senses, ingendreth windinesse, and provoketh overmuch sleepe, especially being eaten raw