Georges Cuvier Quotes

...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry.

I originally worked as an archaeologist in North Carolina, and when bones were found police would take them out to the bones lady at the university, and that was me.

Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.

Bones tell me the story of a person's life - how old they were, what their gender was, their ancestral background.

So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.

At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.

Those who grasp the whole, will also comprehend all parts of that whole, even when immediate technical understanding is lacking, and recognize and marshal these.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole. -Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur

The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole.

To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.

The whole idea is to enable you to see mentally the picture at all hours of the day.

Ultimately, the entire universe...has to be understood as a single undivided whole.

Your whole life informs your eye.

Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

They don't see that whole pattern. Worm/death. Worm/death. I would catch on.

I had been afraid of the awful presence of the river, which was the soul of the river, but through her [Ultima] I learned that my spirit shared in the spirit of all things.

The whole process of working with Steven [Sebring] and being filmed by him helped me psychologically to get my feet back on the ground.

Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?

One need not be eminent in any part of profound knowledge in order to understand it and to apply it. The various segments of the system of profound knowledge cannot be separated. They interact with each other. For example knowledge about psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.

I've actually never been taken on a date in my whole life. I have never had a one-night stand. I'm a real relationship person — contrary to public perception.