William Morris Davis quotes
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“It is the relationship between the physical environment and the environed organism, between physiography and ontography (to coin a term), that constitutes the essential principles of geography today.”
-- William Morris Davis -
“Once established, an original river advances through its long life, manifesting certain peculiarities of youth, maturity and old age, by which its successive stages of growth may be recognized without much difficulty.”
-- William Morris Davis -
“The more clearly the immensely speculative nature of geological science is recognized, the easier it becomes to remodel our concepts of any inferred terrestrial conditions and processes in order to make outrages upon them not outrageous.”
-- William Morris Davis -
“The meaning of geography is as much a sealed book to the person of ordinary intelligence and education as the meaning of a great cathedral would be to a backwoodsman, and yet no cathedral can be more suggestive of past history in its many architectural forms than is the land about us, with its innumerable and marvellously significant geographic forms. It makes one grieve to think of opportunity for mental enjoyment that is last because of the failure of education in this respect.”
-- William Morris Davis -
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“The very foundation of our science is only an inference; far the whole of it rests an the unprovable assumption that, all through the inferred lapse of time which the inferred performance of inferred geological processes involves, they have been going on in a manner consistent with the laws of nature as we know them now.”
-- William Morris Davis
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“Today, ... anything you can come up with that works is worth trying.”
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“The principle of Sturgeon's Razor states that the simplest answer to any problem is 90% crap”
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Source : "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 60), 1937.
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“If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.”
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“The art of reading consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting non essentials.”
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