Edwin Way Teale Quotes

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north.

Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.

It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.

How many beautiful trees gave their lives that today's scandal should, without delay, reach a million readers.

The measure of an enthusiasm must be taken between interesting events. It is between bites that the lukewarm angler loses heart.

If I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell
among all the delights of the open world
on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and
most spiritual and moving of sights
the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

It is those who have compassion for all life who will best safeguard the life of man. Those who become aroused only when man is endangered become aroused too late. We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life and have it habitable for ourselves. It is the conservationist who is concerned with the welfare of all the land and life of the country, who, in the end, will do most to maintain the world as a fit place for human existence.

For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.

A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same - follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.

The world's favorite season is the spring.
All things seem possible in May.

Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.

How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.

To those whom the tree, the birds, the wildflowers represent only "locked-up dollars" have never known or really seen these things.

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

The "dead of winter" ----- how much more dead it would be each year without the birds!

Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.