Biology Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old biology quotes, biology sayings, and biology proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries, and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Freeman Dyson
Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life. Rachel Carson
Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories. Arvind Gupta
Life preys upon life. This is biology's most fundamental fact. Martin H. Fischer
Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant. Cordelia Fine
Biology, it's the technology which builds our world, and we can harness it to shift humanity from a scarcity to an abundance economy. Ryan Bethencourt
Biology sets the context, and that is critical, but obesity still boils down to whether a person eats too much or exercises enough. Robin Marantz Henig
The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface. Brian Eno
Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want. Naomi Wolf
Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat. Terence McKenna
In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. Richard Preston
It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous. Brene Brown
Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being. Walter Gilbert
Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity. George Will
Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique. Jared Diamond
Biology is now accelerating at a pace faster than Moore's Law. Arvind Gupta
Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. Ray Kurzweil
Biology will tell you a lot of things, but there are many that it can not explain and you need to look at physics instead. Walter Gilbert
Biology, list history, is not built with 'if's. Andrea Moro
The job of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments. A good theory makes not only predictions, but surprising predictions that then turn out to be true. Francis Crick
Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. Oprah Winfrey
Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe. Physics is the study of the simple ones. Richard Dawkins
The biology of mind bridges the sciences concerned with the natural world and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience. Eric Kandel
Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality. Thomas Cech
Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better. C. J. Cherryh
Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that. Jeremiah P. Ostriker
Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion. Leon Kass
And the more profoundly the science of biology reveals the laws of the life and development of living bodies, the more effective is the science of agronomy. Trofim Lysenko
Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre. Elizabeth Blackburn
Biology always beats will power. Mehmet Oz
Biology can be divided into the study of proximate causes, the study of the physiological sciences broadly conceived, and into the study of ultimate evolutionary causes, the subject of natural history. Mayr
Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. Intelligent design is not a scientific concept. John Marburger
The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on. Bill Gates
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. Francis Crick
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose. Richard Dawkins
There's biology in everything, even when you're feeling spiritual. Helen Fisher
Where there's water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it's bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of biology. Neil deGrasse Tyson
Although Nature needs thousands or millions of years to create a new species, man needs only a few dozen years to destroy one. Victor Scheffer
If physics and biology one day meet, and one of the two is swallowed up, that one will be biology. J. B. S. Haldane
All increasing or dominant species (and it is from these that new species arise) vary considerably, in all their parts, organs and faculties, in every generation. Alfred Russel Wallace
The time however has arrived when biology must, like the other sciences, make a fresh start in a purely speculative direction, free from all entanglement with medical or any other art. Auguste Compte
I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future. Rachel Carson
I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning. Steve Jobs
Our reality depends on what our biology is up to. David Eagleman
All cell biologists are condemned to suffer an incurable secret sorrow: the size of the objects of their passion. … But those of us enamored of the cell must resign ourselves to the perverse, lonely fascination of a human being for things invisible to the naked human eye. L. L. Larison Cudmore
As new areas of the world came into view through exploration, the number of identified species of animals and plants grew astronomically. By 1800 it had reached 70,000. Today more than 1.25 million different species, two-thirds animal and one-third plant, are known, and no biologist supposes that the count is complete. Isaac Asimov
Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics. Stephen Hawking
You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution. Richard Dawkins
The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science. Alton Brown
I don't pretend there aren't biological differences, but I don't believe the desire for leadership is hardwired biology, not the desire to win or excel. I believe that it's socialization, that we're socializing our daughters to nurture and our boys to lead. Sheryl Sandberg
For many years, biology was the unassuming wallflower sister of physics, patiently waiting in the wings, hoping that someone would ask her to dance. Peter Archer
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them. Francis Crick
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory. Charles Darwin
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music. Lewis Thomas
Biology has at least fifty more interesting years. James D. Watson
Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it. J. D. Bernal
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties. James Jeans
The biologist passes, the frog remains. Jean Rostand
Water is life's mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water. Albert Szent-Györgyi
Biology is the search for the chemistry that works. R. J. P. Williams
For the past 15 years at ever faster rates we have been digitizing biology. By that I mean going from the analog world of biology through DNA sequencing into the digital world of the computer. J. Craig Venter
Classification is a very human thing to do. By grouping, we can generalize and predict. Classification helps us to organize what we know, and it makes us better biologists. Donald P. Abbott
The blood in the animal body is impelled in a circle and is in a state of ceaseless motion... and that is the sole and only end of the motion and contraction of the heart. William Harvey
Man is like every other species in being able to reproduce beyond the carrying capacity of any finite habitat. Man is like no other species in that he is capable of thinking about this fact and discovering its consequences. William R. Catton Jr.
Our biological nature does not stand in the way of social reform. Steven J. Gould
This is the essence of the matter as I understand it: culture is ultimately a biological product. Edward O. Wilson
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. Lyall Watson
I have had several gentlewomen in my house, who were keen on seeing the little eels in vinegar, but some of them were so disgusted at the spectacle, that they vowed they'd never use vinegar again. But what if one should tell such people in the future that there are more animals living in the scum on the teeth in a man's mouth, than there are men in a whole kingdom? Anton van Leeuwenhoek
Every species lives a life unique to itself, and every species dies in a different way. Edward O. Wilson
There's no substitute for fine forceps. None. Donald P. Abbott
The safest and the most prudent of bets to lay money on is surprise. There is a very high probability that whatever astonishes us in biology today will turn out to be usable, and useful, tomorrow. Lewis Thomas