History Of Life Quotes:

The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation.

- Stephen Jay Gould

topic: Events, Stories, History Of Life, Speciation, Gradualism

If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.142, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Years, Joy, History Of Life, Gloria

History illumes reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

topic: Memories, Reality, History Of Life, Tidings

All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life

- David Attenborough

topic: Tree, History Of Life, Life Is

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

- E. O. Wilson

topic: Earth, History Of Life, Surroundings

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

- Salman Rushdie

source: Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

topic: Class, Progress, History Of Life, Cumulative

The whole history of life is a record of cycles.

- Ellsworth Huntington

topic: Records, History Of Life, Life Is

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

- George Santayana

source: George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

topic: Change, Children, Persistence, Condemning, Infancy Is

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

- James Joyce

topic: Truth, History, Trying, Irish Writers, History Of Life

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

- Winston Churchill

topic: Inspirational, Positive, Badass, Inspirational History, Story Writing

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- Maya Angelou

source: FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Mar 15, 2014

topic: Inspirational, Motivational, Positive, Way In Life, Make Me Feel Better

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities. 


- Marcus Tullius Cicero

topic: Memories, Reality, History, Tidings, History Of Life

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

source: "P.S. I Love You: When Mom Wrote, She Always Saved the Best for Last". Book by H. Jackson Brown, Jr., March 1, 1991.

topic: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Young Entrepreneurs, Fear None

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

- Mark Twain

topic: Sad, History, Historical, Racial Prejudice, Writing History

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

- Errol Morris

topic: Past, Ironic, Remember, Condemning, Infancy Is

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

- James W. Loewen

source: "Wicked: Number 5 in series". Book by Sara Shepard, 2011.

topic: Past, Remember, Grades, Condemning, Infancy Is

I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.

- Sheri S. Tepper

source: "Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe". Locus magazine, September 1998.

topic: Important, Goes On, World, Marvelous Things, Continuum

In the history of life, no good news has followed that sentence ["We have to talk."].

- Paul Reiser

topic: Dating, Romance, News, Good News, History Of Life

And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ...We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.

- Niles Eldredge

topic: Reality, Ideas, Knowing, Adaptive, History Of Life

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

- James Gleick

topic: Negative, Life Is, Term, History Of Life

Man is the only mammal whose normal method of locomotion is to walk on two legs. A pattern of mammal behavior that emerges only once in the whole history of life on earth takes a great deal of explaining.

- Elaine Morgan

topic: Men, Two, Normal, History Of Life

The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

- Nathan Wolfe

topic: Way, World, Planets, History Of Life

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

- Susanne Katherina Langer

topic: Mind, World, Earth, Individuation, Prehistory

The coming week in The Hague may prove to be one of the most important in the three-and-a-half-billion year history of life on earth.

- Tony Juniper

topic: Years, Important, Half, History Of Life

Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!

- Jack London

source: Jack London (2014). “The Kempton-Wase Letters”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

topic: Practice, Civilization, Enemy, Artificiality, History Of Life

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

- Santiago Ramon y Cajal

topic: Brain, Intimate, External Forces, History Of Life

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

- William Irwin Thompson

topic: Fairy Tale, Natural, Tales, Storage, Natural History

In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.402, Harvard University Press

topic: Struggle, Events, May, Generalities, History Of Life

Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too...

- Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

topic: Past, Men, Desire, Desire For Knowledge, History Of Life

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

topic: Moon, Skeletons, Museums, Star Gazing, Apocalyptic

Bought the Vegematic and Pocket Fisherman, too, illuminated illustrated history of Life, and Boxcar Willie.

- Steve Goodman

topic: Musical, Pockets, Fisherman, History Of Life

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

topic: Life, Progress, Expansion, History Of Life

The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

- Phillip E. Johnson

source: Phillip E. Johnson (2000). “Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law and Culture”, Intervarsity Press

topic: Important, Roles, Life Is, Natural Science, History Of Life

Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession.

- Stephen Jay Gould

topic: Life, Science, Men, History Of Life

Cancer is not something confined to human beings. It's found in all multi cellular organisms where the adult cells proliferate, so it's widespread in the biosphere. It's a phenomenon that is deeply related to the history of life itself, so by studying cancer I think we can illuminate the history of life itself and vice versa.

- Paul Davies

topic: Cancer, Thinking, Cells, Cellular, Biosphere

The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.

- Robert T. Bakker

topic: Dinosaurs, Extinction, Facts, Tainted, Public Image