Happy Birthday Alexander von Humboldt!

There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

Die gefährlichste Weltanschauung ist die Weltanschauung derer, die die Welt nie angeschaut haben.

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

With most animals, as with man, the alertness of the senses diminishes after years of work, after domestic habits and progress of culture.

This view of a living nature where man is nothing is both odd and sad. Here, in a fertile land, in an eternal greenness, you search in vain for traces of man; you feel you are carried into a different world from the one you were born into.

Der gemeine Eigennutz, der mit den Pflichten der Menschlichkeit, Nationalehre und den Gesetzen des Vaterlandes im Streite liegt, läßt sich durch nichts in seinen Spekulationen stören.

In einem Zeitalter, wo man Früchte oft vor der Blüte erwartet und vieles darum zu verachten scheint, weil es nicht unmittelbar Wunden heilt, den Acker düngt, oder Mühlräder treibt, […] vergißt man, daß Wissenschaften einen inneren Zweck haben und verliert das eigentlich literarische Interesse, das Streben nach Erkenntnis, als Erkenntnis, aus dem Auge.

Überall geht ein früheres Ahnen dem späteren Wissen voraus.

Wissen und Erkennen sind die Freude und die Berechtigung der Menschheit.

One of the noblest characteristics which distinguish modern civilization from that of remoter times is, that it has enlarged the mass of our conceptions, rendered us more capable of perceiving the connection between the physical and intellectual world, and thrown a more general interest over objects which heretofore occupied only a few scientific men, because those objects were contemplated separately, and from a narrower point of view.

While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more enobled by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom; a freedom which, in the ruder conditions of society, belongs only to the individual, but which, in social states enjoying political institutions, appertains as a right to the whole body of the community.

That which we call the Atlantic Ocean is only a valley excavated by the forte of the waters; the form of the seacoast, the salient and re-entrant angles of America, of Africa, and of Europe proclaim this catastrophe.