Words matter. These are the best Naturalist Quotes from famous people such as Greg Graffin, Gore Vidal, Jane Goodall, John Berger, Matt Ridley, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn’t based on fairy tales. It’s based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
I don’t bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.
I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.
I call myself a naturalist as opposed to an atheist, but there are different styles. Some people just like to be close to nature. And some people actually worship nature, which is too wishy-washy because – like a lot of religious believers – they don’t depend on facts.
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.
John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you’ll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there’s a lot of truth to that.
According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside – like God, for example.
One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
To be a naturalist is better than to be a king.
I don’t mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn’t tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better.
A fossil is so powerful. It’s moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil… not the cross.
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.
No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.
