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: “A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index C > Category: Caterpillar

Caterpillar Quotes (5 quotes)

[Elementary student, laying a cocoon on the teacher's desk:] That is serendipity. The caterpillar thinks it is dying but it is really being born.
Anonymous
As quoted, without citation, by Marcus Bach, 'Serendiptiy in the Business World', in The Rotarian (Oct 1981), 139, No. 4, 40.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Birth (154)  |  Cocoon (4)  |  Death (406)  |  Desk (13)  |  Elementary (98)  |  Reality (274)  |  Serendipity (17)  |  Student (317)  |  Teacher (154)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thinking (425)

I remember asking an adult, “What goes on inside a cocoon?” and he said, “The caterpillar is totally broken down into a kind of soup. And then it starts again.” And I remember saying, “That can’t be right.” As a procedure, you can’t imagine how it evolved.
From 'Interview: Of Mind and Matter: David Attenborough Meets Richard Dawkins', The Guardian (11 Sep 2010).
Science quotes on:  |  Adult (24)  |  Ask (420)  |  Belief (615)  |  Broken Down (2)  |  Can�t (16)  |  Change (639)  |  Cocoon (4)  |  Dragonfly (3)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Imagine (176)  |  Inside (30)  |  Kind (564)  |  Larva (8)  |  Procedure (48)  |  Remember (189)  |  Right (473)  |  Soup (10)  |  Start (237)  |  Totally (6)

No video, no photographs, no verbal descriptions, no lectures can provide the enchantment that a few minutes out-of-doors can: watch a spider construct a web; observe a caterpillar systematically ravaging the edge of a leaf; close your eyes, cup your hands behind your ears, and listen to aspen leaves rustle or a stream muse about its pools and eddies. Nothing can replace plucking a cluster of pine needles and rolling them in your fingers to feel how they’re put together, or discovering that “sedges have edges and grasses are round,” The firsthand, right-and-left-brain experience of being in the out-of-doors involves all the senses including some we’ve forgotten about, like smelling water a mile away. No teacher, no student, can help but sense and absorb the larger ecological rhythms at work here, and the intertwining of intricate, varied and complex strands that characterize a rich, healthy natural world.
Into the Field: A Guide to Locally Focused Teaching
Science quotes on:  |  Absorb (54)  |  Aspen (2)  |  Behind (139)  |  Being (1276)  |  Brain (281)  |  Characterize (22)  |  Close (77)  |  Cluster (16)  |  Complex (202)  |  Construct (129)  |  Cup (7)  |  Description (89)  |  Discover (571)  |  Door (94)  |  Ear (69)  |  Ecological (7)  |  Eddy (4)  |  Edge (51)  |  Enchantment (9)  |  Experience (494)  |  Eye (440)  |  Feel (371)  |  Finger (48)  |  Firsthand (2)  |  Forget (125)  |  Forgotten (53)  |  Grass (49)  |  Hand (149)  |  Healthy (70)  |  Help (116)  |  Include (93)  |  Intricate (29)  |  Involve (93)  |  Large (398)  |  Leaf (73)  |  Leave (138)  |  Lecture (111)  |  Listen (81)  |  Mile (43)  |  Minute (129)  |  Muse (10)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural World (33)  |  Needle (7)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Observe (179)  |  Photograph (23)  |  Pine (12)  |  Pluck (5)  |  Pool (16)  |  Provide (79)  |  Ravage (7)  |  Replace (32)  |  Rhythm (21)  |  Rich (66)  |  Right (473)  |  Roll (41)  |  Round (26)  |  Rustle (2)  |  Sedge (2)  |  Sense (785)  |  Smell (29)  |  Spider (14)  |  Strand (9)  |  Stream (83)  |  Student (317)  |  Systematically (7)  |  Teacher (154)  |  Together (392)  |  Vary (27)  |  Verbal (10)  |  Video (2)  |  Watch (118)  |  Water (503)  |  Web (17)  |  Work (1402)  |  World (1850)

The diversity of life is extraordinary. There is said to be a million or so different kinds of living animals, and hundreds of thousands of kinds of plants. But we don’t need to think of the world at large. It is amazing enough to stop and look at a forest or at a meadow—at the grass and trees and caterpillars and hawks and deer. How did all these different kinds of things come about; what forces governed their evolution; what forces maintain their numbers and determine their survival or extinction; what are their relations to each other and to the physical environment in which they live? These are the problems of natural history.
In The Nature of Natural History (1950), 8.
Science quotes on:  |  Amazing (35)  |  Animal (651)  |  Deer (11)  |  Determine (152)  |  Different (595)  |  Diversity (75)  |  Enough (341)  |  Environment (239)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Extinction (80)  |  Extraordinary (83)  |  Force (497)  |  Forest (161)  |  Govern (66)  |  Grass (49)  |  Hawk (4)  |  History (716)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Kind (564)  |  Large (398)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Living (492)  |  Look (584)  |  Maintain (105)  |  Meadow (21)  |  Million (124)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural History (77)  |  Number (710)  |  Other (2233)  |  Physical (518)  |  Plant (320)  |  Problem (731)  |  Relation (166)  |  Survival (105)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Tree (269)  |  World (1850)

There is no waste in functioning natural ecosystems. All organisms, dead or alive, are potential sources of food for other organisms. A caterpillar eats a leaf; a robin eats the caterpillar; a hawk eats the robin. When the plant, caterpillar, robin, and hawk die, they are in turn consumed by decomposers.
From Resource Conservation and Management (1990), 101.
Science quotes on:  |  Alive (97)  |  Consume (13)  |  Dead (65)  |  Death (406)  |  Eat (108)  |  Ecosystem (33)  |  Food (213)  |  Food Web (8)  |  Hawk (4)  |  Leaf (73)  |  Natural (810)  |  Organism (231)  |  Other (2233)  |  Plant (320)  |  Potential (75)  |  Robin (4)  |  Source (101)  |  Turn (454)  |  Waste (109)


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.