"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul."
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Quote collection
Luther Burbank quotes (page 1 of 4)
66 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love. While I was conducting experiments to make spineless cacti, I often talked to the plants. . . . "You have nothing to fear," I would tell them. "You don't need your defensive thorns. I will protect you." Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety."
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"Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education."
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"If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed."
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"Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think."
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"The greatest happiness in the world is to make others happy."
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"If you violate Nature's laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman."
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"I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection."
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"Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our judgment and reason. . . ."
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"The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. But while I cannot conceive of such a God, I do recognize the existence of a great universal power - a power which we cannot even begin to comprehend and might as well not attempt to. It may be a conscious mind, or it may not. I don't know. As a scientist I should like to know, but as a man, I am not so vitally concerned."
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"Heredity is nothing but stored environment."
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"Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after-world. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell."
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"We must return to nature and nature's god."
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"It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean."
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"A flower is an educated weed."
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"Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature"
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"Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also, should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth."
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"Science is the only savior."
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"Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature."
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"As a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. As for their prophets, there are as many today as ever before, only now science refuses to let them overstep the bounds of common sense."
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