Quotes from Bully for Brontosaurus — Stephen Jay Gould
1941–2002 United States
← All quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
5 quotes
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by "knowing" the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science—or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)