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Nature Quotes

 

Most people are on the world, not in it -- have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them -- undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. ---John Muir

Men are better watching the seasons and putting good into the earth than running together in cities where they listen all day to each other's noises. . .

--Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

Thousands of tired, nerve shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers but as fountain of life --John Muir

Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury and hangman.

-Luther Burbank

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

-Anatole France

I forget how many thousand eggs go wrong for one codfish that gets hatched. But as Berkeley said long ago, it is idle to censure the creation as wasteful if you believe in a creator who has unlimited stuff to play with.

-Sir Frederick Pollock.

The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.

--J. Frank Dobie 1943

Nature produces nothing for nothing.

--Mandan Indian, 1806

All living things are destined to die and be recycled as a part of the flow of energy through the life community. Which is to say, a creature must feed, and sooner or later it will be fed upon.

--Durward Allen (Wolves of Minong)

El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.

--Richard Adams (Watership Down)

A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell...a death-wind for my people.

--Sitting Bull, 19th century

A buffalo head and horns on a sportsman's wall!! I'd rather see the critter livin', breathin', kickin' and free.

--Anon., 19th century

It would be a real misfortune to permit the species to become extinct.

--Theodore Roosevelt 1907

One of the saddest sights today
Is watching a buffalo cow chew baled hay,
In a pen, in a zoo, like a sardine can;
It's a lump in the throat of an outdoor man.

--J. R. Williams, 20th century

When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

--William Beebe 1906