George Perkins Marsh Quotes

The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.

All Nature is linked together by invisible bonds and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life.

Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.

The great question, whether man is of nature or above her.

Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.

We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth.

The improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries. So much more the reason for beginning now.

[ ... ] one must have known the Levant to be able to conceive how readily persons intelligent and otherwise respectable will prefer a lie to the truth, when the slightest advantage is to be gained by the use of a falsehood.

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.