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Who said: “Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed.”
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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index G > Jay Griffiths Quotes

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Jay Griffiths
(1965 - )

English writer whose several books include Wild: An Elemental Journey (2006), a narration of her seven-year exploration of the wildest places on earth, from the Amazon rain forest to the Arctic. She also contributes articles to a number of periodicals such as Observer and Ecologist.

Science Quotes by Jay Griffiths (7 quotes)

I wish there was a verb to otter, ottering around in pure play, to honour Otter ludens, which plays in my mind long after I’ve seen one.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012),
Science quotes on:  |  Honor (57)  |  Honour (58)  |  Long (778)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Otter (2)  |  Play (116)  |  Pure (299)  |  Wish (216)  |  Word (650)

Take nature out of Shakespeare and it would be incalculably impoverished; without his bunch of radish or shotten herring Falstaff wouldn’t be truly Falstaff, nor would Ophelia’s lament be so poignant without her rosemary for remembrance and rue for you.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012).
Science quotes on:  |  Falstaff (2)  |  Herring (4)  |  Impoverished (3)  |  Lament (11)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Ophelia (2)  |  Poignant (3)  |  Remembrance (5)  |  William Shakespeare (109)  |  Truly (118)

The forest doctors of the Amazon say each plant has its “song”, and that to know how to use the plant you must listen to its voice.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012).
Science quotes on:  |  Amazon (11)  |  Doctor (191)  |  Forest (161)  |  Know (1538)  |  Listen (81)  |  Must (1525)  |  Plant (320)  |  Rain Forest (34)  |  Say (989)  |  Song (41)  |  Use (771)  |  Voice (54)

The human mind needs nature in order to think most deeply. Pretending to be other creatures, children practise metaphor and empathy alike.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012),
Science quotes on:  |  Alike (60)  |  Child (333)  |  Children (201)  |  Creature (242)  |  Empathy (4)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Mind (133)  |  Metaphor (37)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Most (1728)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Order (638)  |  Other (2233)  |  Play (116)  |  Practice (212)  |  Pretend (18)  |  Psychology (166)  |  Think (1122)

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind. Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out. … When our experience of the wild world shrinks, we no longer fathom the depths of our own words; language loses its lustre and vividness.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012),
Science quotes on:  |  Animal (651)  |  Animal Life (21)  |  Badger (2)  |  Brain (281)  |  Cat (52)  |  Cradle (19)  |  Depth (97)  |  Experience (494)  |  Fathom (15)  |  Fox (9)  |  Hare (3)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Mind (133)  |  Idea (881)  |  Language (308)  |  Life (1870)  |  Lose (165)  |  Loss (117)  |  Lustre (3)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural World (33)  |  Play (116)  |  Shrink (23)  |  Silence (62)  |  Something (718)  |  Speak (240)  |  Squirrel (11)  |  Wild (96)  |  Word (650)  |  World (1850)

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind’s music, medicine and knowledge.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012),
Science quotes on:  |  Deforestation (50)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Music (133)  |  Rain Forest (34)  |  Silence (62)  |  Tree (269)

The stupidity of overfishing would have shocked Carson, herself a marine biologist. … Dredgers carve graveyards in seabeds, fertilisers fuel plankton blooms that result in oxygenless dead zones, and climate change threatens much sea life.
— Jay Griffiths
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012). Griffiths also quotes a professor of marine conservation, Callum Roberts, from his Ocean of Life that “Since the 1950s, when she published her trilogy The Sea, two-thirds of the species we have fished have collapsed, and some species are down 99%.”
Science quotes on:  |  Biologist (70)  |  Bloom (11)  |  Rachel Carson (49)  |  Carve (5)  |  Change (639)  |  Climate (102)  |  Climate Change (76)  |  Fuel (39)  |  Graveyard (3)  |  Life (1870)  |  Overfishing (27)  |  Oxygen (77)  |  Plankton (3)  |  Result (700)  |  Sea (326)  |  Sea Life (4)  |  Shock (38)  |  Stupidity (40)  |  Threat (36)  |  Threaten (33)


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)
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- 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


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