A world is sooner destroyed than made.
—Thomas Burnet, 1684It’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second.
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1794There is a time to battle against nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice.
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1979Oil! Our secret god, our secret sharer, our magic wand, fulfiller of our every desire, our coconspirator, the sine qua non in all we do!
—Margaret Atwood, 2015Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?
—Stanisław Lem, 1961Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896Nature never jests.
—Albrecht von Haller, 1751We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BCIt seems to me that we all look at nature too much and live with her too little.
—Oscar Wilde, 1897Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
—Francis Bacon, 1625In tampering with the earth, we tamper with a mystery.
—Jonathan Schell, 2000The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
—Anne Sexton, 1971It raineth every day, and the weather represents our tearful despair on a large scale.
—Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1865It is the little causes, long continued, which are considered as bringing about the greatest changes of the earth.
—James Hutton, 1795The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.
—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1920The earth is beautiful and bright and kindly, but that is not all. The earth is also terrible and dark and cruel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1970Man’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.
—Barbara Ward, 1972You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.
—Horace, 20 BCWhen nature is overriden, she takes her revenge.
—Marya Mannes, 1958Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.
—Aldo Leopold, 1933Those who cross the seas change their climate but not their character.
—Roman proverbConjecturing a Climate
Of unsuspended Suns –
Adds poignancy to Winter
The oldest voice in the world is the wind.
—Donald Culross Peattie, 1950Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
—D.H. Lawrence, 1920The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.
—John Henry Poynting, 1899There is something stirring in the way civilization gapes like a savage at the achievements of nature.
—Karl Kraus, 1909The earth is our existence, and our body is attached to the earth.
—Daulat Qazi, c. 1650Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.
—Theodore Roszak, 1972Attend to earth,
for it is to earth that kings are truly wedded.
Among famous traitors of history, one might mention the weather.
—Ilka Chase, 1969It is hard when nature does not respect your intentions, and she never does exactly respect them.
—Wendell Berry, 1985