Natural World Quotes - Page 8

• Many people think they are too refined, or too rational, to entertain a real sense of wonder in themselves or in others. This is preposterous to me, since the natural world is full of endless wonders, both on Earth and especially in space, no matter how you think it was created.

  Garry Kasparov

  Real, Thinking, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.

  John Burnham Schwartz

  Children, Real, Animal

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• I can't conceive of anything being more varied and rich and handsome than the planet Earth. And its crowning beauty is the natural world. I want to soak it up, to understand it as well as I can, and to absorb it. And then I'd like to put it together and express it in my paintings. This is the way I want to dedicate my work.

  Robert Bateman

  Together, World, Earth

  "Garden tales reveal what's bugging folks" by Kathleen Sullivan, www.sfgate.com. August 13, 2004.

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• Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Writing, Blood, Years

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• We have too long treated the natural world as an adversary rather than as a life-sustaining gift from the Almighty. If man has the genius to build, which he has, he must also have the ability and the responsibility to preserve.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Responsibility, Men, Long

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• I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."

  Jonathan Franzen

  Thinking, Bird, Looks

  "Exclusive: Jonathan Franzen sounds off on bird poaching, climate change and “performing love”". Interview with LIindsay Abrams, www.salon.com. April 27, 2015.

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• Anne Pitkin's poems have such lyrical sweep, such a sensitive eye for the natural world as it touches the human, that reading Winter Arguments is like seeing a landscape or, better, a richly realized painting of a landscape dotted with figures. But that would leave out their music, which would be a loss. This is a wise and graceful book by a well-traveled woman who knows how to confront deep feeling and frame it to make it all the more intense.

  Rosellen Brown

  Wise, Book, Reading

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• All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all he sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. His feet tread the lowest places of the earth; but his head is above all glory, and everywhere he is supreme.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Feet, Broken, Parent

  "Life Thoughts, Gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher, by One of His Congregation". Book edited by Edna Dean Proctor, 1859.

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• At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.

  David Attenborough

  Lonely, Long, People

  "Life in the Freezer". Documentary, www.imdb.com. (1993 - ).

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• If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option.

  PZ Myers

  Religious, World, Faces

  Profile at Freedom from Religion Foundation, ffrf.org.

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• Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

  David Suzuki

  Moving, Identity, World

  David Suzuki (2007). “The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, Updated and Expanded”, p.263, Greystone Books Ltd

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• With our technologies--ones of incalcuable power: earth-restoring, planet preserving--we can rediscover an intimacy, a mutuality with the natural world, that is not primitive (though based in part on fear), but knowing. It might even be possible to relearn a life of awe. And inhabit the landscape without violation. With the least violation.

  Janet Kauffman

  Technology, Knowing, World

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• In the midst of the complexities of modern life, with all its pressures, the spirit of man needs to refresh itself by communion with unspoiled nature. In such surroundings- occasional as our visits may be- we can achieve that kind of physical and spiritual renewal that comes alone from the wonder of the natural world.

  Laurance Rockefeller

  Spiritual, Men, Needs

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• In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.

  Robert B. Laughlin

  Thinking, Profound, Development

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• I feel like one of God's chosen people, having had the opportunity to share, with many fine companions, these varied and lovely realms of our natural world.

  Fred Bear

  Opportunity, People, Lovely

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• No beast has ever overcome the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.

  Liberty Hyde Bailey

  World, Earth, Beast

  "The Holy Earth".

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• It's easy to love the snow because at the end of every snowstorm it's as if the world has started over. There is no dirt, no footprints, just a layer of seamless, indiscriminate nature connecting everything to everything else. Isn't that the amazing thing about the natural world? You can tear it down, you can drill holes in it, you can ignore its power with all your might, but one morning you wake up and it has selflessly given despite all of our abuse. I think I'll make a snowman.

  Andrew McMahon

  Morning, Thinking, Snow

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• I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  Animal, Important, Trying

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• We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.

  Bernd Heinrich

  Strong, Party, Animal

  Bernd Heinrich, Alice Calaprice (1993). “One Man's Owl”, p.14, Princeton University Press

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• The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.

  Richard Fortey

  Intelligent, Class, Museums

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• The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.

  Richard Louv

  Real, Smart, Leader

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• Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and, ultimately, wiser.

  Rob Hopkins

  Humble, World, Natural

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• When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Grateful, Reality, Law

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.495, A&C Black

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• The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.

  Andre Malraux

  Christian, Art, Men

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, Part IV, Chapter VI, 1953.

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• Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world

  Roger Scruton

  Borders, World, Addresses

  Roger Scruton (2014). “The Soul of the World”, p.175, Princeton University Press

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