Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that's been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

At least in part, people are attracted to subjects where they can identify at a basic level with the people who do it. The extraordinary aesthetic of the natural world is not obvious to someone who never leaves the inner city. Appreciation of the elegance and power of physical law is an acquired taste.

It's always interesting just to see how the human mind is relating to the natural universe, and what we try to make of it just so we can believe we understand what's going on.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

I've always been fascinated with science and exploring our world, from microbes to the solar system.

Curiosity is the hunger of the human mind.

What a glorious title, Nature, a veritable stroke of genius to have hit upon. It is more than a cosmos, more than a universe. It includes the seen as well as the unseen, the possible as well as the actual, Nature and Nature's God, mind and matter. I am lost in admiration of the effulgent blaze of ideas it calls forth.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.

Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name.

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

Science gives you an understanding of the physical world, and it increases the capacity for fascination.