“Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”
-- Mark Twain
“Men argue; Nature acts.”
-- Voltaire
“The most incomprehensible fact about Nature is that it is comprehensible.”
-- Albert Einstein
“To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night - brothers who see now they are truly brothers.”
-- Archibald MacLeish, Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold, 1968
“You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.”
-- Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish, Suquamish and allied Indian tribes, Letter to President Franklin Pierce, 1854
“The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.”
-- Ben Elton, Dinner in Los Angeles, 1989
“The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.”
-- Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition, 1958
“Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages - you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?”
-- Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives, The Great Syringe Tide, 1991
“Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?”
-- Stephen Vizinczey, Rules of the Game, 1970
“God owns heaven, but He craves the earth.”
-- Anne Sexton, The Earth, The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit - not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.”
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Spring, 1854
“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Letter to state governors, 26 February 1937
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
-- Mark Twain, editorial by Charles D. Warner, Hartford Courant, 27 August 1897
“With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me and about me, I walk,
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty”
-- Navaho night chant, in Looking Far West by Frank Bergon and Zeese Papaniklas, 1978
“The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyality to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need -- if only we had the eyes to see ... No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”
-- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
" ... There is no forgiveness in nature ... "
-- Ugo Betti
To read more quotations, click on a force of nature below.
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