Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Rachel Carson (American Biologist)

Rachel Louise Carson (1907–64) was an American naturalist, nonfiction writer, and a pioneering environmental conservationist. She is well known for her writings on the natural history of the sea and environmental pollution.

Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Carson developed a deep interest in the natural world. She studied biology at Johns Hopkins University and completed postgraduate studies at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Later, she taught at Maryland University 1931–36 and worked as a marine biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 1936–49.

Carson became well known with her prize-winning and best-selling The Sea Around Us (1951,) which warned of the increasing danger of large-scale marine pollution, and the assertive Silent Spring (1962,) which directed public concern to the problems caused by the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides weed killers and their destructive effect on food chains.

Carson’s work contributed to the growing conservationist movement since the 1960s.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Rachel Carson

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Memories

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Imagination, Excitement

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings…
There is a common thread that links these scenes and memories—the spectacle of life in all its varied manifestations as it has appeared, evolved, and sometimes died out. Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden. It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Wilderness

A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Rain, Weather

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Wildlife

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
Rachel Carson

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from our sources of strength.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Dreams, Wonder

In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Water

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Nature

The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Wilderness

There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.
Rachel Carson

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Life and Living

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Curiosity, Friendship, Wonder

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Excitement, Inner-child, Fresh

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Choice

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
Rachel Carson

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Beauty, Night, Stars

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Beginnings, Inaction, Procrastination, Getting Going

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Nature

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry
Rachel Carson
Topics: Water

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Beauty, Wonder, Humility

Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life with living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.
The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no high-minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Earth

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.
Rachel Carson
Topics: Wilderness, Earth, Strength, Beauty

Mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny.
Rachel Carson

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