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Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

I think there's so much we don't know and the unknown in the ocean; every 10 years or so, we find some fossil that's been there before mankind.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

Of course, mankind has made giant steps forward. However, what we know is really very, very little compared to what we still have to know.

We have much to learn by studying nature and taking the time to tease out its secrets.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.