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