Man’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, 1962

Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.

—Aldo Leopold, 1933

Among famous traitors of history, one might mention the weather.

—Ilka Chase, 1969

The oldest voice in the world is the wind.

—Donald Culross Peattie, 1950

Oil! 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, 2015

It raineth every day, and the weather represents our tearful despair on a large scale.

—Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1865

The 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, 1970

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

—Barbara Ward, 1972

Those who cross the seas change their climate but not their character.

—Roman proverb

Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.

—Theodore Roszak, 1972

It’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second.

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1794

There is a time to battle against nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice.

—Arthur C. Clarke, 1979

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC

Conjecturing a Climate
Of unsuspended Suns –
Adds poignancy to Winter

—Emily Dickinson, 1863

Nature never jests.

—Albrecht von Haller, 1751

Attend to earth,
for it is to earth that kings are truly wedded.

—Kalidasa, c. 450

There is something stirring in the way civilization gapes like a savage at the achievements of nature.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.

—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008

It is hard when nature does not respect your intentions, and she never does exactly respect them.

—Wendell Berry, 1985

The earth is our existence, and our body is attached to the earth.

—Daulat Qazi, c. 1650

Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?

—Stanisław Lem, 1961

When nature is overriden, she takes her revenge.

—Marya Mannes, 1958

A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew.

—Marcel Proust, c. 1920

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.

—Horace, 20 BC

In tampering with the earth, we tamper with a mystery.

—Jonathan Schell, 2000

The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

—Anne Sexton, 1971

It seems to me that we all look at nature too much and live with her too little.

—Oscar Wilde, 1897

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

—D.H. Lawrence, 1920

A world is sooner destroyed than made.

—Thomas Burnet, 1684

It is the little causes, long continued, which are considered as bringing about the greatest changes of the earth.

—James Hutton, 1795

The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

—John Henry Poynting, 1899

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896