Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Botanists - Page 2

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

After all, time is not money. It is an opportunity to live before you die.

A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should make one.

For chemistry is no science form'd à priori; 'tis no production of the human mind, framed by reasoning and deduction: it took its rise from a number of experiments casually made, without any expectation of what follow'd; and was only reduced into an art or system, by collecting and comparing the effects of such unpremeditated experiments, and observing the uniform tendency thereof. So far, then, as a number of experimenters agree to establish any undoubted truth; so far they may be consider'd as constituting the theory of chemistry.

The main characteristic of Nature's farming can therefore be summed up in a few words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.

The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.

I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.

The plant kingdom covers the entire earth, offering our senses great pleasure and the delights of summer.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

Questions are creative acts of intelligence.

I have indeed lived and worked to my taste either in art or science. What more could a man desire? Knowledge has always been my goal. There is much that I shall leave behind undone...but something at least I was privileged to leave for the world to use, if it so intends...As the Latin poet said I will leave the table of the living like a guest who has eaten his fill. Yes, if I had another life to spend, I certainly would not waste it. But that cannot be, so why complain?

A word, a smile, and the stranger at your elbow may become an interesting friend. All through life we deny ourselves stimulating fellowship because we are too proud or too afraid to unbend.

The savor of the water mint rejoiceth the heart of men.

What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.

The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.

The human mind prefers something which it can recognize to something for which it has no name, and, whereas thousands of persons carry field glasses to bring horses, ships, or steeples close to them, only a few carry even the simplest pocket microscope. Yet a small microscope will reveal wonders a thousand times more thrilling than anything which Alice saw behind the looking-glass.

The last fling of winter is over ... The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it. It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.

The surest method against scandal is to live it down by perseverance in well-doing, and by prayer to God that He would cure the distempered mind of those who traduce and injure us.

Fragments of the natural method must be sought with the greatest care. This is the first and last desideratum among botanists. Nature makes no jumps. [Natura non facit saltus] All taxa show relationships on all sides like the countries on a map of the world.

Who never found what good from science grew, Save the grand truth, that one and one make two.

The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.

The mangosteen, queen of the tropical fruit.

Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.

Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.

In [David] Douglas's success in life ... his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal, at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler.

There is no generation from an egg in the Mineral Kingdom. Hence no vascular circulation of the humours as in the remaining Natural Kingdoms.

The names of the plants ought to be stable [certa], consequently they should be given to stable genera.

It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry.

Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.

As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. … Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. … They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.

We admit as many genera as there are different groups of natural species of which the fructification has the same structure.

Inspiration, it is well recognized, rarely comes unless an individual has immersed himself in the subject. He must have a rich background of knowledge and experience in it.

Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization.

This drink has a magical power. It strengthens the weak, and revives those who have fainted. Those tired after work and physical activity can return their life forces by this drink much sooner than by nourishment. ... It works as a diuretic, an appetizer, an antitoxin.

The surest method against scandal is live it down in well-doing.

If odours may worke satisfaction, they are so soveraigne in plants and so comfortable that no confection of the apothecaries can equall their excellent vertue.

When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins.

There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.

Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.

I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodods. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery?here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalists eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?

My poor are my best patients. God pays for them.

There are some viviparous flies, which bring forth 2,000 young. These in a little time would fill the air, and like clouds intercept the rays of the sun, unless they were devoured by birds, spiders, and many other animals.

From my earliest childhood I nourished and cherished the desire to make a creditable journey in a new country, and write such a respectable account of its natural history as should give me a niche amongst the scientific explorers of the globe I inhabit, and hand my name down as a useful contributor of original matter.