Botany Best Quotes & Sayings

The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive — Frederick Turner

In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan. — Lin Yutang

The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful. — Michael Pollan

This is all very fine, but it won't do-Anatomy-botany-Nonsense! Sir, I know an old woman in Covent Garden, who understands botany better, and as for anatomy, my butcher can dissect a joint full as well; no, young man, all that is stuff; you must go to the bedside, it is there alone you can learn disease!
Comment to Hans Sloane on Robert Boyle's letter of introduction describing Sloane as a 'ripe scholar, a good botanist, a skilful anatomist'. — Thomas Sydenham

It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences. — Thomas Jefferson

Politics is the only serious. subject that men think themselves qualified to act upon without any previous education or instruction whatever. If it happened to be astronomy, or botany, or medicine, or law, he would never be allowed to work in any of these arts, or to take a decisive part in the history of any one of these sciences without having, at least, acquired: the A B C of it; but the awful fact of politics is that we do not take the trouble seriously to understand the political situation. — Hugh Price Hughes

Sometimes shows became almost obsessively obscure, as with the gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) shows of nineteenth-century Britain, when workingmen in the industrial counties of northern England and the Midlands formed themselves into societies, constituted with presidents, secretaries, and stewards, for the purpose of running gooseberry shows - weight being the decisive factor. Quite why this fruit, always something of a minority taste, should become the subject of what only could be described as a cult remains a mystery. — Noel Kingsbury

Half the people who studied botany were hippies who thought they could return to some natural world system. Somehow feeding seven billion people through pure gathering. — Andy Weir

Everybody should be ashamed who uses the wonders of science and engineering without thinking and having mentally realized not more of it than a cow realizes of the botany of the plants which it eats with pleasure. — Albert Einstein

I got into magic because I got into alchemy. Which I got into because I was into chemistry, which I was learning about because I wanted to get better with botany, which I had taken up studying in an effort to grow some killer weed — Drew Hayes

When quite young I can remember I had no thought or wish of surpassing others. I was rather taken with a liking of little arts and bits of learning. My mother carefully fostered a liking for botany, giving me a small microscope and many books, which I yet have. Strange as it may seem, I now believe that botany and the natural system, by exercising discrimination of kinds, is the best of logical exercises. What I may do in logic is perhaps derived from that early attention to botany. — William Stanley Jevons

I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves.
[Letter to W.H. Harvey] — Joseph Dalton Hooker

No, we will not tell our botany team to go fuck themslves. — Andy Weir

Charlotte was lost for words. What did one say to a man in a fake marsupial head, wearing a grass loin-pouch and trying to debate ethnobotany in the middle of a lost world that was supposed to be inaccessible by foot? — Jennifer Fulton

Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. — Arthur Conan Doyle