Naturalist Quotes

1. "It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting."
Author: Adam Brody

2. "I find that 'Ghostbusters' and 'Alien' actually have a lot in common in that they're both so naturalistic in the performances. It feels like people you could be hanging out with right now in this room, yet they're on a spaceship or killing ghosts. But the way they talk is never heightened or otherwordly."
Author: Akiva Schaffer

3. "But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life."
Author: Alfred Russel Wallace

4. "A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian."
Author: C.S. Lewis

5. "They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation."
Author: David Brooks

6. "I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays."
Author: David Lindsay Abaire

7. "You need help when you're starting out. On the other hand, some people are very naturalistic to begin with."
Author: David Naughton

8. "The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape"
Author: David Weinberger

9. "Ne pourrait-on pas dire que toutes les religions du monde ne sont que des sectes de la religion naturelle, et que les juifs, les chrétiens, les musulmans, les païens même ne sont que des naturalistes hérétiques et schismatiques ?"
Author: Denis Diderot

10. "Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again."One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

11. "He blinked in the gloom. He was wearing heavy black trousers and a waistcoat over a stiff white shirt. His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist.The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy."
Author: Greg Egan

12. "I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification."
Author: Greg Graffin

13. "A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross."
Author: Greg Graffin

14. "I'm trying to champion the naturalist's worldview and show it's not as heathen as most religious people would make it out to be."
Author: Greg Graffin

15. "It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws."
Author: Hans Hofmann

16. "The evolutionary explanation for origins, although impossible either to prove or to test scientifically, is nevertheless defended by its proponents on the basis that it is the only explanation which is naturalistic, not involving the 'supernatural' element of a divine Creator."
Author: Henry M. Morris

17. "If you're drawing humans, it can be detrimental to be too naturalistic, which is like animating little corpses."
Author: Henry Selick

18. "The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of devils, ghosts, and other psychical invasions? There is only one answer: we can and do. We are dealing with stories, not with scientific dissertations. And if, as stories, they have the ring of truth, we'll believe them, as stories, implicitly.("Introduction")"
Author: Herbert A. Wise

19. "I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative."
Author: Howard Barker

20. "To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret."
Author: James Hutton

21. "We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion."
Author: James K.A. Smith

22. "Naturalists tell of a noble race of horses that instinctively open a vein with their teeth, when heated and exhausted by a long course, in order to breathe more freely. I am often tempted to open a vein, to procure for myself everlasting liberty. Cento volte ho impugnato una lama per conficcarmela nel cuore. Si dice di una nobile razza i cavalli,che quando si sentono accaldati e affaticati, si aprono istintivamente una vena, per respirare più liberamente. Spesso anche io vorrei aprirmi una vena che mi desse libertà eterna."
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

23. "In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted."
Author: José Ortega Y Gasset

24. "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 rhodos. 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. [perpetual snow] 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 naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?[Letter to Charles Darwin 24 Jun 1849]"
Author: Joseph Dalton Hooker

25. "It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the "copy."
Author: Joseph Roth

26. "- Eh bien, monsieur le naturaliste, demanda le Canadien d'un ton légèrement goguenard, et cette Méditerranée?- Nous flottons à sa surface, ami Ned.- Hein! Fit Conseil, cette nuit même?...- Oui, cette nuit même, en quelques minutes, nous avons franchi cet isthme infranchissable.- Je n'en crois rien, répondit le Canadien.- Et vous avez tort, maître Land, repris-je. Cette côte basse qui s'arrondit vers le sud est la côte égyptienne.- À d'autres, monsieur, répliqua l'entêté Canadien."
Author: Jules Verne

27. "Curious anomaly, fantastic element!" said an ingenious naturalist, "in which the animal kingdom blossoms, and the vegetable does not!"
Author: Jules Verne

28. "Was it a camp?" Daniel asked. Sean nodded. "A naturist camp.""Maya will feel right at home", Corey said from his spot on a wooden lawn chair. Daniel sputtered a laugh and Sean tried to hide his."Naturist, not naturalist," I said. "It means nudist."Corey leaped up and spun. "You mean old, naked butts sat on those chairs?"
Author: Kelley Armstrong

29. "Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore."
Author: Loren Eiseley

30. "Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white … Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack … Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages … the hatcheries of the moon … the earth in my father's mouth."
Author: Mark Haddon

31. "We are supernaturalists first, not naturalists. The only reason we feel compelled to accommodate science is that science says we ought to. But it is science that should accommodate revelation. Revelation has been around much longer."
Author: Matt Chandler

32. "From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots."
Author: Mikhail Bakunin

33. "She attracted people to her; she had presence, an uncommon magnetism. Documenting her effect on her habitat, a naturalist would likely have compared her to a lioness: strong, sleek, and invariably surrounded by her pride."
Author: Mohsin Hamid

34. "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

35. "Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It's because spiders think this is funny, and they don't want you ever to forget them."
Author: Neil Gaiman

36. "Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy."
Author: Phillip E. Johnson

37. "According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example."
Author: Phillip E. Johnson

38. "Some theists in evolutionary science acquiesce to these tacit rules and retain a personal faith while accepting a thoroughly naturalistic picture of physical reality."
Author: Phillip E. Johnson

39. "No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin."
Author: Richard Owen

40. "The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer."
Author: Robert Boyle

41. "Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy."
Author: Robert Wright

42. "Pedestrianism, [William Bingley] claims, is the most 'useful' mode of travel, 'if health and strength are not wanting.''To a naturalist, it is evidently so; since, by this means, he is enabled to examine the country as he goes along; and when he sees occasion, he can also strike out of the road, amongst the mountains or morasses, in a manner completely independent of all those obstacles that inevitably attend the bringing of carriages or horses.'Bingley has a specific reason here for valuing the combination of freedom and intimacy with one's surroundings enjoyed by the pedestrian, but his rationale is generalisable to other travellers."
Author: Robin Jarvis

43. "Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk."
Author: Rosamund Lupton

44. "Tesson évoquant les livres qu'il compte lire durant son ermitage: "Quelques guides naturalistes de la collection Delachaux et Niestlé sur les oiseaux, les plantes et les insectes. La moindre des choses quand on s'invite dans les bois est de connaître le nom de ses hôtes. L'affront serait l'indifférence. Si des gens débarquaient dans mon appartement pour s'y installer de force, j'aimerais au moins qu'ils m'appelassent par mon prénom."
Author: Sylvain Tesson

45. "Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist."
Author: T.S. Eliot

46. "Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells me that the crocodile does not change,—that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. That may be; but the reason is that the crocodile does not live fast—he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood among naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads."
Author: Thomas De Quincey

47. "Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience."
Author: Trofim Lysenko

48. "Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

49. "Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects— that machine, there, for instance. It's a complete ghost to me— I don't understand a thing about it and, well, it's a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

50. "It was in the attempt to ascertain the interrelationships between species that experiments n genetics were first made. The words "evolution" and "origin of species" are now so intimately associated with the name of Darwin that we are apt to forger that the idea of common descent had been prominent in the mnds of naturalists before he wrote, and that, for more than half a century, zealous investigators had been devoting themselves to the experimental study of that possibility. Prominent among this group of experimenters may be mentioned Koelreauter, John Hunter, Herbert Knight, Gartner, Jordan. Naudin, Godron, Lecoq, Wichura--men whose names are familiar to every reader of Animals and Plants unders Domestication."
Author: William Bateson

Naturalist Quotes Pictures