Nature Conservation Quotes

We cannot seem to help ourselves they said. Thus, the hominid spark of intelligence flares, burns everything around it, and fades. Some humans will survive the great conflagration. Thus, begins an endless cycle of destruction spiraling downward until our species is gone. We can hope that before the sun begins to become unstable (it is about half way there now) evolution can produce a new and better intelligence that will have sufficient breadth and depth to understand the ecological consequences of its actions. ~ Garry Rogers

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. ~ Aldo Leopold

Every man ought to plant a tree. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment. ~ Rene Dubos

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. ~ Wallace Stegner

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself. ~ Mollie Beattie

A butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine, I lose the one that is netted by me. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself - as though that were so necessary - that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.
- Coloured Money ~ Mervyn Peake

As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.
Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her. ~ Victor Hugo

An exciting feature of string theory is that the particles emerge from the theory itself: a distinct species of particle arises from each distinct string vibrational pattern. And since the vibrational pattern determines the properties of the corresponding particle, if you understood the theory well enough to delineate all vibrational patterns, you'd be able to explaine all properties of all particles. The potential and the promies, then, is that string theory will transcent quantum field theory by deriving all particle properties mathematically. Not only would this unify everything under the umbrella of vibrating strings, it would establish that future "surprises"-such as the discovery of currently unknown particle species-are built into string theory from the outset and so would be accessible, in principle, to sufficiently industrious calculation. String theory doesn't build piecemeal toward an ever more complete description of nature. It seeks a complete description from the get-go. ~ Brian Greene

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison. ~ J.B. Priestley

I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else ... Nature produces enough for our wants from day to day, and if only every-body took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world. But so long as we have got this inequality, so long we are thieving. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare. ~ Horace Walpole

The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice. ~ Mark Twain

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

Indeed what reason may not go to Schoole to the wisdome of Bees, Ants, and Spiders? what wise hand teacheth them to doe what reason cannot teach us? ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromidaries and Camels; these I confesse, are the Colossus and Majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow Engines there is more curious Mathematicks, and the civilitie of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdome of their Maker. ~ Thomas Browne

When you heard anyone in the middle of a talk which was being deliberately kept off the Affair announce furtively some piece of political news, generally false but always devoutly to be wished, you could induce from the nature of his predictions where his heart lay. ~ Marcel Proust

Want and sickness are too common in many stations of life to deserve more notice than is usually bestowed on the most ordinary vicissitudes of human nature. ~ Charles Dickens

People thought tolerance was the opposite of intolerance. Whereas in fact it was some meaningless neutrality. A child, any child, growing up, discovering herself and the nature of her deepest, most native desires - what use was tolerance to a child? It was encouragement she needed, encouragement first to be, then to love, herself. Or himself, whichever. ~ Jamie O'Neill

What would I do without you? I'd die of stress and depression before nature killed me. ~ James Dashner

Nature often lets us down when we most need her; let us turn to art. ~ Baltasar Gracian

When you have an intense contact of love with nature or another human being, like a spark, then you understand that there is no time and that everything is eternal. ~ Paulo Coelho

Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it. ~ Criss Jami

It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. ~ Henry James

In our advanced technological age, most people deny the possibility of miracles ... Miracles don't happen, we are told, because they contravene the laws of nature and worse, they sound religious! Yet we live and move in a sea of miracle. ~ James Brown

Nothing could have been more imprudent or more natural than this reply. It reflected the ecstasy inspired by great crises. ~ Machado De Assis

Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God. ~ Giordano Bruno

Most people have lost that relationship with Nature; they look at all those mountains, valleys, the streams and the thousand trees as they pass by in their cars or walk up the hills chattering, but they are too absorbed in their own problems to look and be quiet. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is beyond a doubt that everyone should have time for some special delight, if only five minutes each day to seek out a lovely flower or cloud or star, or learn a verse to brighten another's dull task. What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchanges of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations? ~ Helen Keller

Humans are mostly kind only to their own-self, and their own. To another being, they're mostly indifferent, if not inhumane. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Those who know in their hearts that they are not really necessary
and are entirely replaceable
must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nature of their work and build up a false notion of its importance. A further alienation from truth takes place, a further loss of contact with reality. And one thing we can be sure of is that self-deception, whether on the level of the wind and the rain or on that of spiritual reality, must always come up against the real sooner or later, and that its destruction is very painful. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton

I come from a very wiry and long-lived race. Some of my ancestors have been centenarians, and one of them lived 129 years. I am determined to keep up the record and please myself with prospects of great promise. Then again, nature has given me a vivid imagination. ~ Nikola Tesla

It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one's sum of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

We need to bring out the rabble-rousing nature of people. We are gonna need un-repression. We need hundreds of people farting up a storm. We need a big-time, old-fashioned, furious, fart storm. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

St. Hierotheos, the great teacher quoted by Dionysius in his book on Divine Names: "As form giving form to all that is formless, in so far as It is the principle of form, the Divine Nature of the Christ is none the less formless in all that has form, since It transcends all form.... ~ Titus Burckhardt

You come to us well tempered, my child, and it is not in my nature to be sorry for it. It is a well tempered blade that is the strongest. ~ R.L. LaFevers

When you choose, you divide. Then you say, "This is good, that is wrong." And life is a unity. Existence remains undivided, existence remains in a deep unison. It is oneness. If you say, "This is beautiful and that is ugly," mind has entered, because life is both together. And the beautiful becomes ugly, and the ugly goes on becoming beautiful. There is no boundary; no watertight compartments are there. Life goes on flowing from this to that.

Mind has fixed compartments. Fixedness is the nature of mind and fluidity is the nature of life. That's why mind is obsession; it is always fixed, it has a solidness about it. And life is not solid; it is fluid, flexible, goes on moving to the opposite.

Something is alive this moment, next moment is dead. Someone was young this moment, next moment he has become old. The eyes were so beautiful, now they are no more there – just ruins. The face was so rose-like, now nothing is there – not even a ghost of the past. Beautiful becomes ugly, life becomes death, and death goes on taking new birth.

What to do with life? You cannot choose. If you want to be WITH life, with the whole, you have to be choiceless. ~ Osho

The old myth of unlimited growth alienates human beings from nature. To live sustainably we must respect nature and live by its rules. We must walk softly, leaving as small a footprint as possible. ~ Linda Mason Hunter

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature. ~ Henry Miller

Nayrol is without speech and therefore never lies ... (Nayrol is) one of the nature gods of the Red River people. Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

When the mind is attuned to the cosmic law, all the laws of nature are in perfect harmony with the aspirations of the mind. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Our alleged facts might be true in all kinds of ways without contradicting any truth already known. I will dwell now on only one possible line of explanation, not that I see any way of elucidating all the new phenomena I regard as genuine, but because it seems probable I may shed a light on some of those phenomena. All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way continuous; and certain facts, plucked as it were from the very heart of nature , are likely to be of use in our gradual discovery of facts which lie deeper still. ~ William Crookes

The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam. ~ Myrtle Reed

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm. ~ Margaret Wertheim

If life is a question, love is the answer. ~ Giovannie De Sadeleer

The doctrine that God can be incarnated in human form is found in most of the principal historic expositions of the Perennial Philosophy - in Hinduism, in Mahayana Buddhism, in Christianity and in the Mohammedanism of the Sufis, by whom the Prophet was equated with the eternal Logos. When goodness grows weak, When evil increases, I make myself a body. In every age I come back To deliver the holy, To destroy the sin of the sinner, To establish righteousness. He who knows the nature Of my task and my holy birth Is not reborn When he leaves this body; He comes to Me. Flying from fear, From lust and anger, He hides in Me, His refuge and safety. Burnt clean in the blaze of my being, In Me many find home. Bhagavad Gita ~ Aldous Huxley

Every child is born a naturalist. His eyes are, by nature, open to the glories of the stars, the beauty of the flowers, and the mystery of life. ~ Ritu Ghatourey