Quotes from Jean-Henri Fabre

Seek those who find your road agreeable, your personality and mind stimulating, your philosophy acceptable, and your experience helpful. Let those who do not, seek their own kind.

If there is one vegetable which is God-given, it is the haricot bean.

What matters in learning is not to be taught, but to wake up.

The mind is an activity, not a repository.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past. [Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

Science too proceeds by lantern-flashes; it explores nature's inexhaustible mosiac piece by piece. Too often the wick lacks oil; the glass panes of the lantern may not be clean. No matter : his work is not in vain who first recognizes and shows to others one speck of the vast unknown.

People declare as much, without, apparently, looking into the matter very closely. They seem able to dispense with the conscientious observer's scruples, when inflating their bladder of theory.

La clarté est la souveraine politesse de qui manie une plume . (Clarity is the sovereign politeness of the one who wields a pen.)

so slow is moral progress. True, we have the bicycle, the motor-car, the dirigible airship and other marvellous means of breaking our bones; but our morality is not one rung the higher for it all. One would even say that, the farther we proceed in our conquest of matter, the more our morality recedes. The most advanced of our inventions consists in bringing men down with grapeshot and explosives with the swiftness of the reaper mowing the corn.

Let us see but a little at a time and see that little plainly; that is the way to acquire substantial and lasting knowledge.

for the same carbon is forever passing from atmosphere to plant, from plant to animal, and from animal to atmosphere, this last being the common storehouse

You speak to me, in your own fashion, of a strange psychology which is able to reconcile the wonders of a master craftsmanship with aberrations due to unfathomable stupidity.

Then the air the sparrow breathed we could breathe tool

Seek those who find your road agreeable your personality and mind stimulating your philosophy acceptable and your experiences helpful. Let those who do not seek their own kind.