Louis Agassiz Quotes

50 quotes in 1048 categories

• The study of Nature is intercourse with the highest mind. You should never trifle with Nature. At her lowest her works are the works of…
• In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a…
• I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have…
• The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey…
• A man cannot be professor of zoölogy on one day and of chemistry on the next, and do good work in both. As in a…
• You cannot do without one specialty. You must have some base-line to measure the work and attainments of others. For a general view of the…
• I cannot afford to waste my time making money
• In Europe I have been accused of taking my scientific ideas from the Church. In America I have been called a heretic, because I will…
• When chemists have brought their knowledge out of their special laboratories into the laboratory of the world, where chemical combinations are and have been through…
• I sometimes hear preachers speak of the sad condition of men who live without God in the world, but a scientist who lives without God…
• I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God-a God who is behind and within…
• One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were,…
• In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence.…
• The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There…
• The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery…
• A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not…
• It is better to have a few forms well known than to teach a little about many hundred species. Better a dozen specimens thoroughly studied…
• The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts, to explain…
• Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this…
• Every great scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly,…

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