Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon Quotes

Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. 'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?' - The Magician's Nephew

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.

Nature expresses a design of love and truth.

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable.

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew it's biological name? Did it exist?

Nature itself cannot err

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

i happen to enjoy categorization.

You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, and systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown.

Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

The idea of dates, boxes, categories are very scary for me.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.