Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Way Tealewas an American naturalist, photographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930 - 1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 milesof automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth2 June 1899
CountryUnited States of America
How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.
In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.
As the pressure of population increasingly regiments us and crowds us closer together, an association with the wild, winged freedom of the birds will fill an ever growing need in our lives.
Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.
Whenever there is an organized movement to persuade people to believe or do something, whenever an effort is made to "propagate" a creed or set of opinions or convictions or to make people act as we want them to act, the means employed are called propaganda.
It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.
For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.
Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.
Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.
If I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell--among all the delights of the open world--on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and--most spiritual and moving of sights--the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky.
It is morally as bad not to care whether anything is true or not...
To those whom the tree, the birds, the wildflowers represent only "locked-up dollars" have never known or really seen these things.
For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature's finest balm.
Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.