Quotations on the Environment and Nature

Lorraine Anderson
Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, venture, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.

Bernoulli
Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

Mary Frances Berry
The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying that it can't be done.

Wendell Berry
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

James L. Buckley
Of what good is a snail darter? As practical men measure 'good,' probably none; but we simply don't know. What value would they have placed on the cowpox virus before Pasleur; or on penicillium molds (other ~ than those inhabiting blue cheeses) before Fleming; or on wild rubber trees before Goodyear learned to vulcanize their sap? Yet the life of almost every American Is profoundly different because of these species.

Warren Buffett
Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

Rachel Carson
If having endured much, we at last asserted our 'right to know' and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals, we should look around and see what other course is open to us.

Rachel Carson
The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.

George Washington Carver
Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

Charles Caleb Colton
We cannot think too highly of nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.

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

Frank Fraser Darling
Ecology is the physiology of community.

Denis Diderot
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Marian Wright Edelman
You really can change the world if you care enough.

Albert Einstein
The joy of looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Loren Eiseley
If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in water.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The earth laughs in flowers.

James Erwin
Space travel has given us a new appreciation for the Earth. We realize that the Earth is special. We've seen it from afar. We realize that the Earth is the only natural home for man we know of, and that we had better protect it.

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

Richard P. Feynman
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Tony Ten Fingers
As you develop your awareness in nature, you begin to see how we influence all life and how all life influences us.

Joseph Fourier
The profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discovery.

Anatole France
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

Omar Freilla
The environmental justice movement has been about people taking control of their own communities. Those most impacted by a problem are also the ones leading the hunt for a solution.

Henry Fuseli
Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Galileo Galilei
The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

Ross Gelbspan
It's very important to understand that climate change is not just another issue in this complicated world of proliferating issues. Climate change is THE issue which, unchecked, will swamp all other issues.

Kahlil Gibran
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

Goethe
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

Edward Everett Hale
I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

Vaclav Havel
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Werner Heisenberg
The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

Phil Holliday
Half the farming regions of humanity's first civilizations are now deserts.

Kobayashi Issa
Summer night -- even the stars are whispering to each other.

Sigmund Jahn
Only when I saw the Earth from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind's most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.

Thomas Jefferson
Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.

Juvenal
Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Johannes Kepler
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Kathryn Lougheed
The ocean floor is home to a staggering 2.9 * 10²⁹ single-celled organisms - that's 10 million trillion microbes for every human on the planet - but vast thought it is, this figure is only 8% of the previous estimate of 35.5 * 10²⁹.

Eric Mackay
Lightning is the shorthand of a storm, and tells of chaos.

Orison Swett Marden
We make the world we live in and shape our own environment.

Marshall McLuhan
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Stephanie Meyer
I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars.

Molescholte
The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

John Muir
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

John Muir
When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find attached to it the rest of the world.

Guy Murchie
If winds are the spirit of the sky's ocean, the clouds are the texture. Their is easily the most uninhibited dominion of the earth. Nothing in physical shape is too fantastic for them. They can be round as apples or as fine as string, as dense as a jungle, as wispy as a whiff of down, as mild as puddle water or as potent as the belch of a volcano. Some are thunderous anvils formed by violent up drafts from the warm earth. Some are ragged coattails of storms that have passed. Some are stagnant blankets of warm air resting on cold.

Nancy Newhall
Conservation is humanity caring for the future.

Charles Panati
We are the environment.

Joseph Chilton Pearce
We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making.

Stanley C. Pearson
Ecologists believe that a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.

Llewelyn Powys
No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.

Herbert Rappaport
I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.

Richard Rogers
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

Theodore Roosevelt
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

Theodore Roosevelt
There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.

Theodore Roszak
Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.

John Ruskin
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.

Kirkpatrick Sale
Any intact ecosystem - rainforest or desert or marshland - exhibits a complexity far beyond any supermachine, any metropolis, any whole civilization of human devising.

Jonas Salk
Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

Socrates
See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

David Suzuki
Our choices at all levels-individual, community, corporate and government-affect nature. And they affect us.

Henry David Thoreau
We need the tonic of wildness [and] ... nature.

Neil Degrasse Tyson
We are all connected: to each other, biologically; to the earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe, atomically.

Stewart L. Udall
America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

Jon Wynne-Tyson
We must develop a better sense of responsibility towards our total environment ...

Some of the above quotations were compiled by The Cybernation Victory Quotations Homepage.