Quotes π¨οΈ
We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.
β Robert Sapolsky, Determined
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
β John Muir, Our National Parks
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature; the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. β Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from the series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense.
β Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals
It is said that humans are defined and distinguished from other animals by our ability to use tools and language, but often I wonder if the most uniquely human trait is our ability to deceive ourselves.
β Carl Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean
For all of our intelligence, we have still failed to grasp the simple reality that we need the planet more than the planet needs us.
β Ed Winters, This Is Vegan Propaganda
Plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don't suppose anybody really understands yet.
β Jane Goodall
Humans now occupy or have seriously altered nearly all of the spaces outside our parks and preserves. Each of us carries an inherent responsibility to preserve the quality of earth's ecosystems.
β Doug Tallamy, Nature's Best Hope
When we build an attractive home, we raze land on which animals have already built their homes. They have nowhere to go.
β Ingrid Newkirk
You canβt see anything from a car; youβve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail youβll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.
β Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
You can take a book to the beach without worrying about sand getting in its works. You can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off. You can spill coffee on it. You can sit on it. You can put it down on a table, open to the page youβre reading, and when you pick it up a few days later it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery die.
β Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
Educating yourself does not mean that you were stupid in the first place; it means that you are intelligent enough to know that there is plenty left to learn.
β Melanie Joy
The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.
β Michael Greger, How Not to Die
Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it.
β Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods
The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.
β David Brower
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
β Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow