Stephen Jay Gould · 352 pages
Rating: (8.2K votes)
“Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
“Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film...”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
“Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
“The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
“Genius has as many components as the mind itself.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
“The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*?”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Stephen Jay Gould
Born place: in New York City, New York, The United States
Born date September 10, 1941
See more on GoodReads
“I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines, and newspapers, and telephones and wireless telegraphing.”
― E. Nesbit, quote from The Enchanted Castle
“خامرنى شعور أن للصحراء خاصية لا تشجع الثرثرة بلا هدف”
― Ahdaf Soueif, quote from The Map of Love
“Bravurní kousek Mosadu způsobil zlom v jeho vztazích se CIA a díky útlé brožurce , kterou půvabná Lucie půjčila milovanému Wiktorovi, získal pověst nejschopnější tajné služby na světě.”
― Michael Bar-Zohar, quote from Mossad
“I went away and drew up a list of all the things you wouldn’t have to suffer if you weren’t here anymore. It was something like this: No more illness, no more struggling to be healthy. No struggling – period. No loss: you would never have to grieve the passing of another. Heartbreak! How lovely not to have to wake in the morning with a heart full of fragments and eyes full of grit. No ageing – here’s a universal truth: the older you get, the more life loses its sparkle, loses a little of the magic. The endless, wonderful possibilities of youth where everything and anything feel possible – that fades . . . But then I considered all the things you would not experience: Falling hopelessly in love. Your wedding day. Knowing the blessing of a child. Seeing the sunset in places far and wide. Earning the right in old age to become eccentric, even cantankerous. Getting properly drunk on champagne. Sleeping in a meadow, by a brook. Decorating a room. Waking wrapped in the arms of the one you love. Fresh caught lobster, eaten on a dock. Being old enough to know better, but still laughing so hard at nothing much that you feel dizzy with happiness. Oh, my darling, this list is endless, it stretches on for infinity . . . And”
― Amanda Prowse, quote from The Food of Love
“I would have done anything to stop the hitting. Anything. So much for human dignity, I think, a few whacks in the ribs and you’re calling a fat guy God and eating soil at his request.”
― George Saunders, quote from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Shadow's Edge
From Hell
Code Name Verity
Eon: Dragoneye Rebor...
Wake
Glass SwordBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
