Tag: John Muir

Today we celebrate Earth Day. Let’s do it in our own way, sharing Earth Day Quotes.

Every day is Earth Day. ~Author Unknown

I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn. ~A Chieftan from Nigeria

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. ~Native American Proverb

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. ~Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau

There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all. ~Robert Orben

I’m not an environmentalist. I’m an Earth warrior. ~Darryl Cherney, quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. ~Bill Vaughn, quoted in Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon, 1987

For 200 years we’ve been conquering Nature. Now we’re beating it to death. ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977

A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it’s taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn’t reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says – go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining. ~David Brin

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature. ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1963

Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time. ~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855

Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values…. God made life simple. It is man who complicates it. ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader’s Digest, July 1972

After a visit to the beach, it’s hard to believe that we live in a material world. ~Pam Shaw

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. ~John Muir

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea. ~George Carlin

Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away. ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990

Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind. ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978

It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times…. What the Dickens is going on here? ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. ~Juvenal, Satires

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet. ~Brooke Medicine Eagle

You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. ~William Shakespeare

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~Cree Indian Proverb