Quotations on Ecology
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
Martin Luther
Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyles.
Pope John Paul II
There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. For your immortal spirit is in all things.
The Wisdom of Solomon 11:24 – 12:1
The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
Jane Goodall
When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.
H. G. Wells
The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait ‘til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
Thomas Edison
We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.
Margaret Mead
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum. And they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”
There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Soviet Union, no China, no Taiwan…. Rivers flow unimpeded across the swaths of continents. The persistent tides — the pulse of the sea —- do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth.
Jacques Cousteau
The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.
Claude Monet
The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman
Remember, the growth of a believer is not like a mushroom — but like an oak, which increases slowly indeed — but surely. Many suns, showers, and frosts, pass upon it before it comes to perfection. And in winter, when it seems to be dead — it is gathering strength at the root. Be humble, watchful, and diligent in the means, and endeavor to look through all, and fix your eye upon Jesus — and all shall be well.
John Newton, (author of the hymn Amazing Grace)
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
Native American Proverb
In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.
Aristotle
This we know… the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to earth. All things are connected, like the blood which connects one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life -he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle
When all is said and done, is there any more wonderful sight, any moment when man’s reason is nearer to some sort of contact with the nature of the world than the sowing of seeds, the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs or the grafting of slips?
St. Augustine
Let us be good stewards of the Earth we inherited. All of us have to share the Earth’s fragile ecosystems and precious resources, and each of us has a role to play in preserving them. If we are to go on living together on this earth, we must all be responsible for it.
Kofi Annan
The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.
René Dubos
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
John Burroughs
My best Acquaintances are those With Whom I spoke no Word — The Stars that stated come to Town Esteemed Me never rude Although to their Celestial Call I failed to make reply — My constant — reverential Face Sufficient Courtesy.
Emily Dickinson
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
Blaise Pascal
We cannot command nature except by obeying her
Francis Bacon
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
Edward Abbey
The Spirit is not only the love that stirs in the intimate depths of our own beings, but is the love that surrounds and sustains the uncounted insects, animals, and trees that share the exuberant life of a rain forest.
Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Frank Lloyd Wright
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry
As for you, my flock … Is it not enough for you to feed on good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?
Ezekiel 34:17-19
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau
The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it.
Chinese proverb
As the poet said, ‘Only God can make a tree’— probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
Woody Allen
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
Helen Keller
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
Cree Indian proverb
While fields and floods, rock, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.
Isaac Watts, hymn “Joy to the World”
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in
George Washington Carver
Never does Nature say one thing, and wisdom another.
Juvenal
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where you can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature, and God.
Anne Frank
My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God’s lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.
Henry David Thoreau
I will put my rainbow in the clouds to be a sign of my promise to the earth.
Genesis 9:12-13 (God’s Word Translation)
When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have put in their places; What is man, that you keep him in mind? The son of man, that you take him into account? For you have made him only a little lower than the gods, crowning him with glory and honor. You have made him ruler over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet; All sheep and oxen, and all the beasts of the field; The birds of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatever goes through the deep waters of the seas.
Psalm 8:3-8 (The Bible In Basic English)
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
Albert Schweitzer
Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
Ken Kesey
Nature does nothing uselessly.
Aristotle
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
Gregory Bateson
The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.
Thomas Berry
The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry
“I want to make it clear, if there is ever a conflict (between environmental quality and economic growth), I will go for beauty, clean air, water, and landscape.”
Jimmy Carter
There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.”
Herman Daly
In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet
Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment.
René Dubos
The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
Barry Commoner
Well, I think I was always sort of reflecting where I was and my sense of surroundings and ecology, urban or country, or foreign, living in Europe, very affected by all of that.
Daniel Berrigan
Deep ecologists claim that before knowing what we ought to do, we must understand who we really are.
Michael Zimmerman
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1670)
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety can be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organization, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution.
Aldous Huxley
All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful: the Lord God made them all. Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings, God made their glowing colors, and made their tiny wings. The purple-headed mountains, the river running by, the sunset and the morning that brightens up the sky. The cold wind in the winter, the pleasant summer sun, the ripe fruits in the garden: God made them every one. God gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell how great is God Almighty, who has made all things well.
Cecil Frances Alexander, hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”
Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.
Glenn Prickett (Conservation International)
The earth, that flower-bed that is our dwelling.
Dante Alighieri (Paradiso, XXII, 151)
Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and the genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit
