Quotes by Naturalists - Page 5

Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
Theodore Roosevelt
We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
Charles Darwin
Few persons realize how much of their happiness such as it is is dependent upon their work.
John Burroughs
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
John Muir
Life is stranger than biology textbooks.
David Rains Wallace
The measure of an enthusiasm must be taken between interesting events. It is between bites that the lukewarm angler loses heart.
Edwin Way Teale
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin
Women distrust men too much in general and too little in particular.
Philibert Commerson
You can fail many times, but you're not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else.
John Burroughs
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
Charles Darwin
...that when you wanted to see something very badly,sometimes you had to stay still,stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it,and be patient.If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.
Helen Macdonald
It was a boyish thing to do and it caught the hesitating girl in the depths of her heart, as the boy element in a man ever appeals to a motherly woman.
Gene Stratton-Porter
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
Peter Matthiessen
Pray not for lighter burdens but for stronger backs.
Theodore Roosevelt
Who that has ever visited the borders of this classic sea, has not felt at the first sight of its waters a glow of reverent rapture akin to devotion, and an instinctive sensation of thanksgiving at being permitted to stand before these hallowed waves? All that concerns the Mediterranean is of the deepest interest to civilized man, for the history of its progress is the history of the development of the world; the memory of the great men who have lived and died around its banks; the recollection of the undying works that have come thence to delight us for ever; the story of patient research and brilliant discoveries connected with every physical phenomenon presented by its waves and currents, and with every order of creatures dwelling in and around its waters. The science of the Mediterranean is the epitome of the science of the world.
Edward Forbes
Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
Theodore Roosevelt
How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I hadn ever before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, "A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake" feeling sure I was going to learn something.
John Muir
The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.
Alexander von Humboldt
Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.
William Henry Hudson
Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
Peter Matthiessen
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin
I am a part of all I have read.
John Kieran
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official.
Theodore Roosevelt
[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.
Georges Cuvier
I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
John Burroughs
The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.
Ellen Meloy
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
John Muir
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
John Muir
The secret of happiness is something to do
John Burroughs
Home is where the heart is.
Pliny
Going to the woods is going home.
John Muir
But Aunt Margaret doesn't like boys," objected Elnora."Well, she likes me, and I used to be a boy. ...
Gene Stratton-Porter
Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!
Diane Ackerman
I'd suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had known her as a girl and I was starting to understand how spooked she'd felt. I wasn't sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms. [p. 95]
Diane Ackerman
I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.
Diane Ackerman
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.
Henry Beston
To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business & corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
Theodore Roosevelt
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.
Theodore Roosevelt
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
Gerald Durrell
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.
Charles Darwin
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
Theodore Roosevelt
Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.
Henry Beston
One frequently hears that there are not enough places for people to go. But where do we not go? We are too many and tread too heavily. (Perhaps the world is to blame for being too small.)
David M. Carroll
That is why I decline to recognize the meremultimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country;and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses hiswealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use- and such is often thecase- why, then he does become an asset of real worth.
Theodore Roosevelt
It is never worth while to absolutely exhaust one's self or to take big chances unless for an adequate object.
Theodore Roosevelt
No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
Theodore Roosevelt
Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in anycommonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if theytend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for whichthey are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the readytalker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage,sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the bodypolitic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admirethe gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to dowrong to the republic.
Theodore Roosevelt
Believe that you can and you are halfway there
Theodore Roosevelt
When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.
Helen Macdonald
To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.
Richard Mabey
In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”“I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the ‘snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks” of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe.
Peter Matthiessen
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.
Edwin Way Teale
The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books
Theodore Roosevelt
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Diane Ackerman
A poor woman from Manchester on being taken to the seaside is said to have expressed her delight on seeing for the first time something of which there was enough for everybody.
John Lubbock
The arbutus is now open everywhere in the woods and groves. How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year! If the blossoms were liable to change–if they were to become capricious and irregular–they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less; they might be just as bright, and gay, and fragrant under other forms, but they would not be the violets, and squirrel-cups, and ground laurels we loved last year. Whatever your roving fancies may say, there is a virtue in constancy which has a reward above all that fickle change can bestow, giving strength and purity to every affection of life, and even throwing additional grace about the flowers which bloom in our native fields. We admire the strange and brilliant plant of the green-house, but we love most the simple flowers we have loved of old, which have bloomed many a spring, through rain and sunshine, on our native soil.
Susan Fenimore Cooper
Wonder feeds our best intelligence and is perhaps its source.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt
The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.
William Henry Hudson
Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
John Muir