Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue. Ralph Waldo Emerson
About This Quote

Charles Darwin was an amazing man who made many contributions to science. He was also an amazing writer, and the above quote is pretty deep. Darwin believed that the language of nature was significant and universal. He thought nature had meaning beyond our current understanding. He wanted to learn how the language of nature worked so that he could read the great book which is written in that tongue.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy - Isaac Newton
  2. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? - Annie Dillard
  3. When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough. - Hediger
  4. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more - George Gordon Byron
  5. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. - Robinson Jeffers
More Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson
  1. Love, and you shall be loved.
  2. He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
  3. The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
  4. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
  5. It is not the length of life, but the depth.
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