Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

Take, for example, the African jungle, the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old, the sick, the wounded, the weak, the very young, but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey, you had better be strong.

I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I haven't quite got over the miracle that you plant things, and they do sprout up.

The sun gives spirit and life to the plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.

Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.

Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.

Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.

Natural selection is anything but random.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

The wood of any tree growing anywhere records fairly faithfully the oxygen and hydrogen chemistry of the water the plant has access to through precipitation.

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities-ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.

The visible mark of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of creation.

Modifying ourselves is a natural process because we are a product of nature and what we do is a product of nature. Therefore, if one day we have three time bigger brain and two hearts instead of one (because one is not enough) then this is all part of nature.

This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

Nature is full of wonders; every atom is a standing miracle, and endowed with such qualities, as could not be impressed on it by a power and wisdom less than infinite.

I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me.

The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days.