Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Attenborough

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.

David Attenborough

Bringing nature into the classroom can kindle a fascination and passion for the diversity of life on earth and can motivate a sense of responsibility to safeguard it.

David Attenborough

The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.

David Sobel

We tiptoed the tops of beaver dams, hopped hummocks, went wading, looked at spring flowers, tried to catcha snake, got lost and found. How fine it was to move at a meandery, child's pace.

David Sobel

Wet sneakers and muddy clothes are prerequisites for understanding the water cycle.

David Sobel

Exploration of the natural world begins in early childhood, flourishes in middle childhood, and continues in adolescence as a pleasure and a source of strength for social action.

David Sobel

The heart of childhood, from seven to eleven, is the critical period for bonding with the earth.

David Sobel

If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, let us allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it.

David Hare

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Confucius

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant.

Andre Malraux

There's no such thing as a grown up person.

when we leave society and come into the presence of Nature, we become children again; and the fictions of thought and action assumed among men drop off like a garment.

Ambrose Bierce

PLAGUE, n. In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharaoh the Immune. The plague today . . . is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

Ambrose Bierce

Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

Ambrose Bierce

A miracle is an act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king.

Ambrose Bierce

Cat: a soft indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Ambrose Bierce

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").

Ambrose Bierce

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Alice Meynell

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

Alice Meynell

There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple - leaves with an early moon.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

Albert Camus

Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.

Albert Camus

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

Albert Camus

The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.

Annie Besant

Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect.

Annie Dillard

Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Annie Dillard

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

Annie Dillard

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.

Annie Dillard

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

Anna Sewell

God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.

Angelus Silesius

The rose that with you earthly eyes you see, has flowered in God from all eternity.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Alfred de Vigny

From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.