Quotes by Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Explore a curated collection of 14 quotes by Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Discover timeless wisdom, insightful thoughts, and memorable words that have inspired readers around the world. Browse through the gallery below and click on any quote to read more.

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? An — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive t — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins. — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of t — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism). — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Memory is the enemy of wonder — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
For great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are grow — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“ — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty i — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World