The thought is genuinely Aristotle’s and the sentence is locatable: it sits in Parts of Animals, Book I, chapter 5 (Bekker 645a16–17), where the Greek reads “ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φυσικοῖς ἔνεστί τι θαυμαστόν.” What we could not pin down is this exact English. W. Ogle’s 1882 translation compresses the clause into “Every realm of nature is marvellous”; A. L. Peck’s 1937 Loeb has “in all natural things there is somewhat of the marvellous.” The popular wording matches no published translation we could locate, and the sites that carry it cite no edition at all.
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous” Aristotle, Parts of Animals, Book I, chap. 5 (645a16), c. 350 BC — this English wording matches no identified published translation
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? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Parts of Animals (De Partibus Animalium), Book I, chapter 5
Passage
Bekker 645a16–17 — Greek: “ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φυσικοῖς ἔνεστί τι θαυμαστόν”; the treatise is dated to around 350 BC
Translation
Excerpt below: W. Ogle, Aristotle on the Parts of Animals (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882). Compare A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (1937).
Attribution
Attributed — the passage is Aristotle’s, but this exact English belongs to no translation we could identify
We therefore must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen, is reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.
Ogle, 1882
That is W. Ogle’s 1882 rendering, transcribed from the scanned Kegan Paul edition. The clause behind the famous quote is the one Ogle turns into “Every realm of nature is marvellous”; Peck’s 1937 Loeb, printed facing the Greek, gives it as “in all natural things there is somewhat of the marvellous.”
The clause is where the Greek says it is. In the Loeb Classical Library Parts of Animals, the Greek at 645a runs “ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φυσικοῖς ἔνεστί τι θαυμαστόν,” and A. L. Peck’s facing English reads “since in all natural things there is somewhat of the marvellous” (full text of the volume ↗). The Wellcome Collection catalogue dates that Loeb volume to 1937, Heinemann and Harvard University Press ↗.
The oldest English of the passage says something different. W. Ogle’s translation — published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. in 1882 ↗ — compresses the clause to “Every realm of nature is marvellous ↗.” A reader looking for the popular sentence in the standard public-domain translation will never find it.
Modern scholarship words it a third way. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Aristotle’s biology ↗, by James G. Lennox, quotes the passage as PA I 5, 645a4–36 and renders the line “For in all natural things there is something marvelous” — close to the circulating version, but not identical, and the entry names no translator for it.
The popular wording travels without a source. On Wikiquote ↗ it appears only as an uncited caption beneath an engraving, while the page’s sourced Parts of Animals entry (Book I, Part 5) uses Ogle’s wording; Goodreads ↗ and the other aggregators give the author’s name and nothing else.
Aristotle’s Greek has been out of copyright for centuries, and the translation excerpted above — W. Ogle’s, published in 1882 — is public domain in the United States ↗. The status of the popular one-line wording itself is a separate question and cannot be settled here: it is not Ogle’s, and it is not the wording of A. L. Peck’s 1937 Loeb translation (which remains in copyright), so we cannot say which edition, if any, it came from.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
The attribution problem
Nobody stole this one. The name on the card is right, and so is the sentiment — the problem is that the exact English has no parent, and the sites that spread it never say where it came from.
✕
The wordingNo identified translator unsourced English
Goodreads, BrainyQuote, Quotefancy and the rest carry the line with the author’s name and nothing else — no work, no book, no translator. Goodreads even prints a disclaimer ↗ that its quotes are community-added and not verified.
✕
The reference layerWikiquote (the caption, not the sourced list) uncited
On Wikiquote’s Aristotle page ↗ the popular wording appears only as the caption under an engraving, with no citation; the page’s properly sourced Parts of Animals entry, Book I, Part 5, uses Ogle’s different wording instead.
✓The sentence itself is real Aristotle: Parts of Animals I.5, Bekker 645a16–17, part of his argument that even the humblest animal repays study — read the passage in context ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
Aristotle wrote this in the middle of a defence — of himself, and of the whole business of dissecting animals. He has just conceded that some creatures are unpleasant to look at, and that studying the heavens is in one sense the nobler pursuit. His answer is that we can actually get at the causes of things down here, and that a bloody, unglamorous specimen on the bench is still nature doing something worth understanding.
To make the point stick he tells a story about Heraclitus, found by visitors warming himself at the kitchen stove: embarrassed, they hung back, and he told them to come in anyway, because there were gods in there too. Aristotle’s conclusion, in Ogle’s 1882 English, is that we should “venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.” It is a manifesto for field biology, written in a treatise dated to around 350 BC.
Every realm of nature is marvellous.
Why the English keeps changing
The Greek clause is short — seven words — and translators have split on how literally to take it. Ogle turned it into an aphorism (“Every realm of nature is marvellous”). Peck, working for a facing-page Loeb edition, stayed closer to the syntax (“in all natural things there is somewhat of the marvellous”). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Aristotle’s biology ↗, citing PA I 5, 645a4–36, renders it “For in all natural things there is something marvelous.”
The circulating quote-card version sits closest to that last shape, with “all natural things” smoothed into “all things of nature.” That is a reasonable rendering of the Greek — it is simply not one we can trace to a translator, a publisher or a date, which is why this page stops short of calling it verified.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
384–322 BC · Greek philosopher and the first systematic biologist
Aristotle joined Plato’s Academy in Athens at about seventeen and stayed close to twenty years; later, barred as a foreigner from owning property, he rented the buildings known as the Lyceum and ran his own school there. Biology takes up a large share of his surviving work — History of Animals, Generation of Animals, Parts of Animals — and much of it rests on first-hand observation, including a stretch of zoological fieldwork around Lesbos. Parts of Animals is where he stops mid-treatise to argue that the humblest creature repays study, and this sentence is the hinge of that argument.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Aristotle. Aristotle on the Parts of Animals, Book I, chap. 5 (Bekker 645a16–17). Translated with notes by W. Ogle. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882. The popular English wording quoted here appears in neither Ogle’s translation nor A. L. Peck’s Loeb Classical Library Parts of Animals (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937); its source edition is unidentified.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/in-all-things-of-nature-there-is-something-of-the-marvelous/