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
“لماذا تشبه أفكار النساء الازهار في مهب الرياح. فتنجرف مع التيار وتتلاشى بلا أثر?”
― Lisa See, quote from Peony in Love
“Arthur Devlin, you and my husband may have been in the same grade, but you were never in the same class.”
― Clare Vanderpool, quote from Moon Over Manifest
“Actually the choice is simple. When your child decides to love a new person, you can either see it as a chance to hate some people - the person they choose and their families. However, you can also see it as a chance to love some more people. And since when did loving more become a bad thing?”
― Chetan Bhagat, quote from 2 States: The Story of My Marriage
“Not everything needs to be planned, Zane,” Ty answered with a tinge of frustration. “Not everything needs a why or how.”
― Abigail Roux, quote from Cut & Run
“Believe me, Being gay is not a choice. Noone would choose to make life harder than it has to be.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Sing You Home
Scott Pilgrim, Volum...
All That Matters
The Imperfectionists
A Killing Frost
My Unfair Godmother
RedshirtsBookQuoters 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.
