The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

A tree's wood is also its memoir.

People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.

The world is a fickle place, and it's not fair. But if you're getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you're working for the right reason, and you're going in the right direction.

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.

You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.

A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.

If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.

I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.

You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.

While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.

I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.

I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.

I like weeds and hardy plants.

I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.

I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.

Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.

During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.

I feel like I'm the same scientist I was back when I couldn't get a grant. Now I'm that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It's fickle. And I also don't think it was constructed with people like me in mind.

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.

Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out.

There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field - but it does not.

I think there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just not immune to that - which actually isn't a very controversial stance if you think about it.

The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.