16 quotes
Futile for science to try to discover what the forces of Nature are; it can only discover how they operate.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Old earth is great with her children, the bulb and the grub, and the sleepy mammal and the seed.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
It is my contention that specialization should be left to those who are not mentally gifted at generalization.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Not blood nor flesh not hair nor feathers, not the chlorophyll or cellulose of the plants, is stranger than the stuff called chitin.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Star-gazing is a common name for harmless futility.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
It is Nature herself, as we grow in comprehension of her, who weans us from our early faith.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Grant but a single teleological explanation in biology, and you have left the path of scientific thinking. Plan there may be, but only a working plan, a vast experimentation still in course.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Evolution is not a mere product of life, like starch or blood; it is a part of life itself, just as flow is part of a river.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
No picture of life today is even worth a glance that does not show the bacteria as the foundation of life itself, the broad base of the pyramid on which all the rest is erected.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
A tree in its old age is like a bent but mellowed and wise old man; it inspires our respect and tender admiration; it is too noble to need our pity.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
The time to hear bird music is between four and six in the morning. Seven o’clock is not too late, but by eight the fine rapture is over, due, I suspect, to the contentment of the inner man that comes with breakfast; a poet should always be hungry or have a lost love.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
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.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
The beauty of a butterfly’s wing, the beauty of all things, is not a slave to purpose, a drudge sold to futurity. It is excrescence, superabundance, random ebullience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own high right.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
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 summertime. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
In Thomas Henry Huxley Darwinism had a champion in invincible armor. For sheer glitter his mind has seldom had an equal in any land or age and he laid waste about him with the weapon of truth. “The cradle of every science,” he chuckled, “is surrounded by dead theologians as that of Hercules was with strangled serpents.”
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
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.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)