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: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index N > Category: Nature Of Man

Nature Of Man Quotes (8 quotes)

Geology is intimately related to almost all the physical sciences, as is history to the moral. An historian should, if possible, be at once profoundly acquainted with ethics, politics, jurisprudence, the military art, theology; in a word, with all branches of knowledge, whereby any insight into human affairs, or into the moral and intellectual nature of man, can be obtained. It would be no less desirable that a geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature. With these accomplishments the historian and geologist would rarely fail to draw correct and philosophical conclusions from the various monuments transmitted to them of former occurrences.
Principles of Geology (1830-3), Vol. 1, 2-3.
Science quotes on:  |  Accomplishment (102)  |  Anatomy (75)  |  Art (680)  |  Botany (63)  |  Chemistry (376)  |  Conclusion (266)  |  Desirable (33)  |  Draw (140)  |  Ethic (39)  |  Ethics (53)  |  Fail (191)  |  Former (138)  |  Geologist (82)  |  Geology (240)  |  Historian (59)  |  History (716)  |  Human (1512)  |  Insight (107)  |  Intellectual (258)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Man (2252)  |  Military (45)  |  Mineralogy (24)  |  Monument (45)  |  Moral (203)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural Philosophy (52)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Obtain (164)  |  Occurrence (53)  |  Organic (161)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Physical (518)  |  Physical Science (104)  |  Politics (122)  |  Possible (560)  |  Short (200)  |  Theology (54)  |  Various (205)  |  Word (650)  |  Zoology (38)

I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.
Letter to Asa Gray (22 May 1860). In Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters (1892), 236.
Science quotes on:  |  Bad (185)  |  Belief (615)  |  Brute (30)  |  Brute Force (4)  |  Call (781)  |  Chance (244)  |  Conclude (66)  |  Conclusion (266)  |  Content (75)  |  Design (203)  |  Detail (150)  |  Dog (70)  |  Everything (489)  |  Feel (371)  |  Force (497)  |  Good (906)  |  Hope (321)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Intellect (32)  |  Inclination (36)  |  Inclined (41)  |  Intellect (251)  |  Law (913)  |  Look (584)  |  Man (2252)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Most (1728)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Notion (120)  |  Profound (105)  |  Result (700)  |  Satisfaction (76)  |  Speculation (137)  |  Subject (543)  |  Universe (900)  |  View (496)  |  Whole (756)  |  Wonder (251)  |  Wonderful (155)

Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate their subject matters.
In article 'Man', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1964), 108, 482-85. Collected in Cumulative Record: Definitive Edition (2015).
Science quotes on:  |  Behavior (95)  |  Both (496)  |  Change (639)  |  Essential (210)  |  Man (2252)  |  Manipulate (11)  |  Matter (821)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Power (771)  |  Study (701)  |  Subject (543)  |  Technology (281)  |  Vast (188)  |  World (1850)  |  Yield (86)

Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's “King Solomon's Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject.
'Autobiography of Allan M. Cormack,' Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures 1979, editted by Wilhelm Odelberg.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Animal (651)  |  Become (821)  |  Call (781)  |  Discussion (78)  |  Disenchantment (2)  |  Doctrine (81)  |  Ecology (81)  |  Enlightenment (21)  |  First (1302)  |  Formal (37)  |  Interest (416)  |  Man (2252)  |  Men (20)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Political (124)  |  Problem (731)  |  Professor (133)  |  Reading (136)  |  Religion (369)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Study (701)  |  Subject (543)  |  Teach (299)  |  Tell (344)  |  Theorist (44)  |  Thinker (41)

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
In Leviathan: Or, The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1886), 64.
Science quotes on:  |  Cause (561)  |  Competition (45)  |  Diffidence (2)  |  Find (1014)  |  First (1302)  |  Glory (66)  |  Man (2252)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Principal (69)  |  Psychology (166)  |  Quarrel (10)

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature without promise.
African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961), 348.
Science quotes on:  |  Adaptability (7)  |  Call (781)  |  Change (639)  |  Civilization (220)  |  Creature (242)  |  Cunning (17)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Find (1014)  |  Improbability (11)  |  Known (453)  |  Man (2252)  |  Miracle (85)  |  Poem (104)  |  Promise (72)  |  Regard (312)  |  Select (45)  |  Short (200)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Through (846)  |  Unprecedented (11)  |  Wonder (251)  |  Year (963)

The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth.
English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874), 12.
Science quotes on:  |  Birth (154)  |  Distinct (98)  |  Element (322)  |  Himself (461)  |  Influence (231)  |  Innumerable (56)  |  Man (2252)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Nurture (17)  |  Personality (66)  |  Phrase (61)  |  Separate (151)  |  Two (936)  |  Word (650)  |  World (1850)

Whoever would not remain in complete ignorance of the resources which cause him to act; whoever would seize, at a single philosophical glance, the nature of man and animals, and their relations to external objects; whoever would establish, on the intellectual and moral functions, a solid doctrine of mental diseases, of the general and governing influence of the brain in the states of health and disease, should know, that it is indispensable, that the study of the organization of the brain should march side by side with that of its functions.
On the Organ of the Moral Qualities and Intellectual Faculties, and the Plurality of the Cerebral Organs (1835), 45-6.
Science quotes on:  |  Act (278)  |  Animal (651)  |  Brain (281)  |  Cause (561)  |  Complete (209)  |  Disease (340)  |  Function (235)  |  General (521)  |  Glance (36)  |  Governing (20)  |  Health (210)  |  Ignorance (254)  |  Influence (231)  |  Intellectual (258)  |  Know (1538)  |  Man (2252)  |  Man And Animals (7)  |  March (48)  |  Mental (179)  |  Moral (203)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Object (438)  |  Organization (120)  |  Remain (355)  |  Side (236)  |  Single (365)  |  Solid (119)  |  State (505)  |  Study (701)  |  Whoever (42)


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.