“As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.”

In natural science the principles of truth ought to be confirmed by observation.

A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should make one.

A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discovers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.

If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.

Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.

It is not God, but people themselves who shorten their lives by not keeping physically fit.

A practical botanist will distinguish at the first glance the plant of the different quarters of the globe and yet will be at a loss to tell by what marks he detects them.

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

The plant kingdom covers the entire earth, offering our senses great pleasure and the delights of summer.

Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow live and feel.

When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins.

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

We don’t hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression!

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Can you imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden see another color that nobody else sees?

Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

There is an eighth color that we don’t have the sense apparatus to see or experience.