# Stephen Jay Gould - Quotes: 49 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould ## Books - [Eight Little Piggies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies.md) — 26 quotes - [I Have Landed](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed.md) — 6 quotes - [The Lying Stones of Marrakech](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech.md) — 7 quotes - [Wonderful Life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/wonderful-life.md) — 10 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: “si monumentum requiris, circumspice”—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacredness — of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance. p. 251 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/christopher-wren-the.md) > Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques? p. 25 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/will-we-ever.md) > The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly. p. 114 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/the-skein-of-human.md) > In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue). p. 6 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/in-return-for.md) > No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call “temperament.” p. 281 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/no-one-should.md) > Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes “for” particular items of anatomy or behavior. p. 234 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/complex-organisms-cannot.md) > [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds. p. 318 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/in-natural-history.md) > [G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make “novelty seeking” or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation. p. 282 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/g-enes-make-enzymes.md) > No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern. p. 48 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/no-more-harmful.md) > Darwin grasped the philosophical bleakness with his characteristic courage. He argued that hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not “discovered” in nature. We must formulate these answers for ourselves and then approach nature as a partner who can answer other kinds of questions for us—questions about the factual state of the universe, not about the meaning of human life. If we grant nature the independence of her own domain—her answers unframed in human terms—then we can grasp her exquisite beauty in a free and humble way. For then we become liberated to approach nature without the burden of an inappropriate and impossible quest for moral messages to assuage our hopes and fears. We can pay our proper respect to nature's independence and read her own ways as beauty or inspiration in our different terms. p. 109 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/darwin-grasped-the.md) > [T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the “culture wars” that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general […]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline. p. 355 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/the-lying-stones-of-marrakech/t-his-theme-of-mutually.md) > The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright. p. 331 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/the-vigorous-branching.md)