395 Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.

The median is not the message,

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.