QUOTES

Having a collection of good quotes is like having a community of like-minded friends — you can turn to them in times of need for advice, assurance, reminders, or just a quick hug. If you are reading my blog posts, I consider you a like-minded friend and part of a broad community of people I’m connected with. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to my quote “friends” here, and I invite you to share your favorite quotes with this community in the blog post comments section.

I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.

~E.O.Wilson, American biologist, naturalist, and writer considered by many to be the “father of biodiversity”

I don’t think that it is more technology we need, or more money or more data. We need a change in heart, a change in ethics, away from an anthropocentric worldview that considers the Earth our exploitable property to a biocentric, life-centered worldview in which an ethic of respect and reciprocity can grow.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, mother, botanist, writer, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature.

~ Dan Saladino, author of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

What if the catalyst of the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale?…Suppose it God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figured it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?”

~ Cormac McCarthy, author of Whales and Men

Same air, same water, same soil, same earth, same fate.

~ Dr. J. Drew Lanham, American author, poet, and wildlife biologist

One should pay attention to even the smallest crawling creature for these too may have a valuable lesson to teach us.

~ Black Elk, leader of the Oglala Lakota peoples

When one little species goes extinct, it may seem unimportant, but every time one species disappears it’s like pulling a thread from a tapestry and eventually that tapestry hangs in tatters, and that can lead to ecosystem collapse.

~ Jane Goodall, English primatologist and anthropologist

Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

~ Terry Tempest Williams, American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist

Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other — for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.

~ Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (161 – 180) and Stoic philosopher

Plants are attuned to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals.

~ Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth’s biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainable. Only Nature can serve as the planetary ark.

~ E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth

It is that range of of biodiversity that we must care for — the whole thing — rather than just one or two stars.

~ David Attenborough, English broadcaster, natural historian and author

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

~ John Muir, Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the U.S.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

~ Albert Einstein, German theoretical physicist

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.

~ Rachel Carson, American marine biologist, author, and conservationist

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

~ Wendell Berry, American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

~ Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist

Do we feel it — like a phantom limb — the parts of nature that once were, and are no longer?

~ Amy Berenbeim

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world.

~ Howard Zinn, American historian, playwright, philosopher, social thinker, and WWII veteran