Top 1200 Natural History Quotes & Sayings

I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

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?

A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.

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.

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.

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained.

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

For my beauty routine, it's kind of complicated. It's not easy at all. I like being natural, but natural is not really natural. To be natural, you need to have really good skin. This is really important.

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

If there be a mind that, not perceiving in the narratives we have compared the fingermarks of tradition, and hence the legendary character of these evangelical anecdotes, still leans to the historical interpretation, whether natural or supernatural; that mind must be alike ignorant of the true character both of legend and of history, of the natural and the supernatural.

The philosophy that I have worked under most of my life is that the serious study of natural history is an activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person's life. It ultimately makes people protective of the environment in a very committed way. It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue for creating environmentalists.

Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

[Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.

You read about me in history books, but now I am dedicated to spreading the truth about preserving the dignity of all human life from natural conception to natural death.

For me I'm natural not because somebody else believes I'm natural, I'm natural because I don't use steroids, I don't use growth hormone, I don't use any of those enhancers. I'm natural in my own right because I don't do that and not because other people accept the fact that I'm natural or not.

The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

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.

Almost everyone... seems to be quite sure that the differences between the methodologies of history and of the natural sciences are vast. For, we are assured, it is well known that in the natural sciences we start from observation and proceed by induction to theory. And is it not obvious that in history we proceed very differently? Yes, I agree that we proceed very differently. But we do so in the natural sciences as well.

I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

People are used to seeing natural history programmes that have been filmed over many years which are concentrated, focused visions of natural history.

Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

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.

Our main inspiration [with Alix MacKenzie], I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind.

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.

She looks like a fairy tale, but yet feels so natural (natural, natural, natural) This one's a beast, but way to wonderful to be compared to an animal

You cannot just quote from history and above all you cannot take it out of context, in however humorous a fashion . On the contrary history has a natural continuity which must be respected

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors?

On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history.

Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.

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.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.

I can no more explain why I like "natural history" than why I like California canned peaches; nor why I do not care for that enormous brand of natural history which deals with invertebrates any more than why I do not care for brandied peaches. All I can say is that almost as soon as I began to read at all I began to like to read about the natural history of beasts and birds and the more formidable or interesting reptiles and fishes.

There is no such thing as a natural boxer. A natural dancer has to practice hard. A natural painter has to paint all the time. Even a natural fool has to work at it.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

I don't even know what my natural colour is. Natural? What is natural? What is that? I do not believe in totally natural for women. For me, natural has something to do with vegetables.

He (Shoeless Joe Jackson) was the finest natural hitter in the history of the game.

There is no counting the unsolved problems of Natural History.

... in going over the history of all the inventions for which history could be obtained it became more and more clear that in addition to training and in addition to extensive knowledge, a natural quality of mind was also necessary.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

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.

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.

The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive intervals of the harmonic series.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.