Quotations by Theme

Nature - Environment

"The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960

"Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

"Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals."
Aldo Leopold,

"To bare our souls is all we ask, to give all we have to life and the beings surrounding us. Here the nature spirits are intense and we appreciate them, make offerings to them - these nature spirits who call us here - sealing our fate with each other, celebrating our love."
Alex Grey, 1953-

"A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories."
Andy Goldsworthy, 1956

"To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers."
Archibald MacLeish,

"The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth."
Arthur Rimbaud, 1854-1891

"I expect to pass through this world but once, any good thing therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature (or child), let me do it now, let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."
Attienne De Grellet,

"To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth."
Auguste Rodin,

"The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him."
Auguste Rodin, 1840-1917

"I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."
Baruch Spinoza,

"Nature abhors a vacuum."
Benedict Spinoza,

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Bill Vaughan,

"As the astounding vastness of the universe becomes obscured, there is a throwback to a vision of a universe that essentially amounts to earth, or one's country, or state or city. Perspective becomes myopic."
Brian Greene, 1963-

"He plant trees to benefit another generation."
Caecilius Statius, 220-168 BCE

"I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety."
Carol Ann Duffy, 1955-

"It can't be Nature, for it is not sense."
Charles Churchill,

"Essentially, all life depends upon the soil .... There can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together."
Charles E. Kellogg,

"Nature has endowed the earth with glorious wonders and vast resources that man may use for his own ends. Regardless of our tastes or our way of living, there are none that present more variations to tax our imagination than the soil, and certainly none so important to our ancestors, to ourselves, and to our children"
Charles Kellogg,

"You must teach your children...that all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
Chief Seattle,

"Too often, people think that solving the world's problems is based on conquering the earth, rather than touching the earth, touching ground."
Chogyam Trungpa, 1939-1987

"Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature."
Cicero, 106-43 BCE

"The absolute truth is not a matter of opinion but nature"
Cicero, 106-43 BCE

"Nature herself makes the wise man rich."
Cicero, 106-43 BCE

"Everything (everyone) has it's beauty but not everyone sees it."
Confucius, 551-479 BCE

"He who will not economise will have to agonise"
Confucius, 551-479 BCE

"Men! The only animal in the world to fear."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!"
Daniel Dennett, 1942-

"The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster."
David Hume, 1711-1776

"We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means - all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."
Derrick Jensen,

"What this means is that corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host."
Derrick Jensen,

"Nature is what we know - yet have not art to say - so impotent our wisdom is to her simplicity."
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886

"Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake."
Eric Hoffer,

"Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it."
Eugene Delacroix, 1798-1863

"You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches."
Frank Deford,

"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."
Frank Drake,

"A cloak of loose, soft material, held to the earth's hard surface by gravity, is all that lies between life and lifelessness"
Franklin D. Roosevelt,

"We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it. Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times."
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

"Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal. But as it is he has taken himself to be something higher and has imposed stricter laws upon himself. He therefore has a hatred of those stages of man that remain closer to the animal state."
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

"We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742-1799

"Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), 1903-1950

"Remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), 1903-1950

"Woodman, spare that tree!/Touch not a single bough!/ In youth it sheltered me,/And I’ll protect it now."
George Pope Morris, 1802-1864

"The muffled syllables that nature speaks, fill us with deeper longing for her word."
George Santayana, 1863-1952

"We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place."
Gunther Grass, 1927-

"You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion, or challenge the ideology of a violet."
Hal Borland,

"As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill."
Helen Keller, 1880-1968

"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."
Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862

"In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich."
Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1887

"The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency."
Herbert Read,

"Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations."
Herbert Spencer,

"Yes, the poetry of earth is never dead . . . the poetry of earth is ceasing never."
Hohn Keats,

"You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through."
Ilya Ehrenburg, 1891-1967

"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."
Immanuel Kant,

"The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it."
Jacques Yves Cousteau,

"If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect."
Jacques Yves Cousteau,

"Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans."
Jacques Yves Cousteau,

"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat."
Jacques Yves Cousteau,

"I hope to make people realise how totally helpless animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must be that we will be kind and take care of their needs."
James Herriot,

"After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life."
John Polkinghorne,

"Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about."
John Polkinghorne,

"The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves."
Joseph Addison,

"Since we humans have the better brain, isn't it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?"
Joy Adamson, 1910-1980

"I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree."
Joyce Kilmer, 1886-1918

"We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot."
Leonardo Da Vinci,

"In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world. ... Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying ... on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace."
Louise Erdrich,

"In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men."
Luigi Russolo, 1885-1947

"We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world."
Margaret Mead,

"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court."
Mark Twain, 1835-1910

"Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage."
Mason Cooley,

"Even cats grow lonely and anxious."
Mason Cooley,

"The world is not what I think, but what I live, I am open to the world, I communicate with it, but I don’t possess it, it is inexhaustible."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908 - 1961

"Let us permit Nature to have her way; she understands her business better than we do."
Michel de Montaigne,

"Chaos is the soul of creation. It plows the ground of intuition. Without chaos, nothing will grow."
Michell Cassou,

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
Muriel Rukeyser, 1913-1980

"Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves."
Nagarjuna,

"Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down."
Paul Cezanne,

"Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star."
Paul Dirac,

"All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals."
Peter Singer, 1946-

"There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intellingent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see -- not to eat, not for love, but only gliding."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"Nature hates calculators."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."
Richard P. Feynman, 1918-1988

"Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint."
Robert Delaunay, 1885-1941

"A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden."
Robert Southey,

"Washoe [the chimpanzee (and friend for over 30 years)] has taught me that we are both a part of the natural world we share with all our fellow animals. She has taught me that personhood is something we share, and that personhood goes beyond species classifications. She has taught me that human arrogance is very lethal to our fellow beings on this planet, especially when it is combined with human ignorance. She has taught me that the most profound scientific discoveries are often based on the most humble approach. She has taught me that compassion is one of our dearest traits, and that we should value it above all others, including intelligence. She helped me to realize that if we humans do not embrace and respect our fellow species on this planet, then we stand a good chance of destroying the whole thing."
Roger Fouts,

"Today we no longer regard the universe as the cause of our own undeserved troubles but perhaps, on the contrary, as the last refuge from the mismanagement of our earthly affairs."
Rudolf Arnheim,

"All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature."
Rudolf Steiner,

"What is necessary to keep providing good care to nature has completely fallen into ignorance during the materialism era."
Rudolf Steiner, 1861-1925

"All art is an imitation of nature."
Seneca, 5BC-65AD

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."
Stephen Hawking,

"Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since—not because of a mysterious élan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure. So, in another sense, life—complex, whole, emergent—is simple after all, a natural outgrowth of the world in which we live."
Stuart Kauffman,

"Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free"
Stuart Kaufmann,

"I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves."
Susan Griffin, 1943-

"At the source of the longest river/The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree."
T. S. Eliot, 1888-1965

"The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules."
Thomas Reid, 1710-1796

"Wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else …"
Umberto Eco,

"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures."
Vincent Van Gogh, 1853 - 1890

"Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills."
Voltaire, 1694-1778

"A cloak of loose, soft material, held to the earth's hard surface by gravity, is all that lies between life and lifelessness"
Wallace H.Fuller,

"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope."
Wendell Berry,

"The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all."
Wendell Berry,

"Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves."
Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1076

"The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves."
Willem de Kooning, 1904 - 1997

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
William Blake, 1757 - 1827

"With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."
William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"
William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850

"For all things come from earth, and all things end by becoming earth.""
Xenophanes, 570 - 480 BCE

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