35 Quotes by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

I've never taught one, because if I taught one, I'd have to teach others... I would give myself over to a slavery, whereas I want to stay a free man.

My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my ideas, but I'll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am shown plausible reasons which I can grasp.

For my part, I hold it equally impossible for a small shellfish to be produced without generation as for a whale to have its origin from the mud.

If we now plainly perceive that the passage of the blood from the arteries into the veins of the tadpole is not performed in any other than those vessels, which are so minute as only to admit the passage of a single globule at a time, we may conclude that the same is performed in like manner in our own bodies and in those of other animals.

When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by so doing I can't restore my body, a whole apothecary's shop couldn't do much, and that is the only thing I have done for years when I have felt a fever.

I now found that the spider cannot fix its thread to anything without imprinting the hind part of its body on the place, by which pressure it emits an incredible number of excessively small threads diverging in every direction from whence we may conclude that as soon as the threads are exposed to the air, they lose their viscosity or gluey quality.

Life lives on life - it is cruel, but it is God's will. And it is for our good, of course, because if there weren't little animals to eat up the young mussels, our canals would be choked by those shellfish, for each mother has more than a thousand young ones at a time!

I must confess... I don't know any tongue but the Nether-Dutch.

Just as the supposed number may differ from the true number by fully 100, 150, or even 200 in a flock of 600 sheep, so may I be even more out of my reckoning in the case of these very little animalcules.