Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

We are a categorically obsessed culture, where we have to compartmentalize everything in reference to another thing, like, 'What does it sound like? Does it sound like this?'

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

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.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

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

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

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

You know, we love to categorise or label everything in our lives: people, movies. But I think that those are just the decorations. They, of course, work. They're great, but that's not the thrust of the film.

How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real.

Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong.

In this complex world, the scientific method, and the consequences of the scientific method are central to everything the human race is doing and to wherever we are going.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?

Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe.

If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

Time is a series of fluctuating variables.

The bell strikes One. We take no note of time But from its loss. To give it then a tongue Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke, I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright, It is the knell of my departed hours.

A man, and a cat, and a dog, are all animals. These particular examples, as man, or dog, or cat, are parts of a bigger and more general concept, animal. The man, and the cat, and the dog, and the plant, and the tree, all come under the still more general concept, life. Again, all these, all beings and all materials, come under the one concept of existence, for we all are in it.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.