TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index B > William Beebe Quotes

Thumbnail of William Beebe (source)
William Beebe
(29 Jul 1877 - 4 Jun 1962)

American biologist, explorer and writer who combined careful biological research and a literary skill, with which he also became famous as a popularizer of science. He advised Theodore Roosevelt on conserving species and environment, and a strong influence for Rachel Carson.


Science Quotes by William Beebe (4 quotes)

Earth has few secrets from the birds.
— William Beebe
In The Bird: Its Form and Function (1906), Vol. 1, 18.
Science quotes on:  |  Bird (163)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Secret (216)

The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer, but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
— William Beebe
In The Bird: Its Form and Function (1906), Vol. 1, 18.
Science quotes on:  |  Art (680)  |  Beauty (313)  |  Breathe (49)  |  Composer (7)  |  Destroy (189)  |  Destruction (135)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Expression (181)  |  Extinction (80)  |  First (1302)  |  Genius (301)  |  Harmony (105)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Individual (420)  |  Inspiration (80)  |  Last (425)  |  Life (1870)  |  Living (492)  |  Material (366)  |  More (2558)  |  Must (1525)  |  Pass (241)  |  Race (278)  |  Species (435)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Vanishing (11)  |  Work (1402)

There was no instant when a mist of plankton … was not swirling in the path of the beam [of the bathysphere].
— William Beebe
As quoted by Rachel Carson in The Sea Around Us (1950, 2003), 62. Carson states that in his bathysphere descent, more than a quarter of a mile down, Beebe reported aggregations of living things “as thick as I have ever seen them.” At half a mile—the deepest descent of the bathysphere—Dr. Beebe recalled the mist of plankton.
Science quotes on:  |  Bathysphere (2)  |  Beam (26)  |  Instant (46)  |  Mist (17)  |  Path (159)  |  Plankton (3)  |  Swirl (10)

To be a Naturalist is better than to be King.
— William Beebe
Journal entry (31 Dec 1893) at age 16. As given in Carol Grant Gould in The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist (2012), 26. It was the concluding remark the third year of his diaries.
Science quotes on:  |  Better (493)  |  King (39)  |  Naturalist (79)



Quotes by others about William Beebe (1)

Ode to The Amoeba
Recall from Time's abysmal chasm
That piece of primal protoplasm
The First Amoeba, strangely splendid,
From whom we're all of us descended.
That First Amoeba, weirdly clever,
Exists today and shall forever,
Because he reproduced by fission;
He split himself, and each division
And subdivision deemed it fitting
To keep on splitting, splitting, splitting;
So, whatsoe'er their billions be,
All, all amoebas still are he.
Zoologists discern his features
In every sort of breathing creatures,
Since all of every living species,
No matter how their breed increases
Or how their ranks have been recruited,
From him alone were evoluted.
King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba
And Hoover sprang from that amoeba;
Columbus, Shakespeare, Darwin, Shelley
Derived from that same bit of jelly.
So famed is he and well-connected,
His statue ought to be erected,
For you and I and William Beebe
Are undeniably amoebae!
(1922). Collected in Gaily the Troubadour (1936), 18.
Science quotes on:  |  Abyss (30)  |  Alone (324)  |  Amoeba (21)  |  Billion (104)  |  Breathing (23)  |  Breed (26)  |  Chasm (9)  |  Clever (41)  |  Christopher Columbus (16)  |  Connect (126)  |  Creature (242)  |  Charles Darwin (322)  |  Descend (49)  |  Discern (35)  |  Division (67)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Exist (458)  |  First (1302)  |  Fission (10)  |  Forever (111)  |  Himself (461)  |  Herbert Hoover (13)  |  Increase (225)  |  Jelly (6)  |  Life (1870)  |  Living (492)  |  Matter (821)  |  Ode (3)  |  Poem (104)  |  Primal (5)  |  Protoplasm (13)  |  Rank (69)  |  Reproduction (74)  |  William Shakespeare (109)  |   Mary Shelley (9)  |  Species (435)  |  Splendid (23)  |  Split (15)  |  Statue (17)  |  Still (614)  |  Time (1911)  |  Today (321)  |  Zoologist (12)


See also:

Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.