395 Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.

I emphatically do not assert the general ‘truth’ of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.

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.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.

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

But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?