Making a town more beautiful and more human can lessen tensions and friction. Any city can do it; and any city would do well to do it.
—Lady Bird Johnson (1912–2007) First Lady of the United States, Conservationist
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
If you plan for a year, plant rice. If you plan for ten years, plant trees. If you plan for 100 years, educate your children.
—Chinese Proverb
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 (1907–64) American Naturalist, Science Writer
Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
Wilderness is a continuous stretch of county preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.
—Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American Ecologist, Conservationist
Dew evaporates
and all our world
is dew—so dear,
so refreshing, so fleeting.
—Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828) Japanese Haiku Poet
We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must resort what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities… Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
—Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73) American Head of State, Political leader
The land, the earth God gave to man for his home…should never be the possession of any man, corporation, (or) society…any more than the air or water.
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) American Head of State
You can only go halfway into the darkest forest; then you are coming out the other side.
—Chinese Proverb
The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
—Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese-American Philosopher, Poet, Sculptor
There’s no music like a little river’s … It takes the mind out of doors … and… sir, it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Scottish Novelist
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?
—Black Elk (1863–1950) Native American Spiritual Leader
We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose—some for cash and some for “political influence.” We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. “Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Since the land is the parent, let the citizens take care of her more carefully than children do their mother.
—Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE) Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
Plants are the young of the world. Vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect man, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The old Lakota was wise, He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.
—Luther Standing Bear (1868–1939) Lakota Chief, Actor
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
With the beauty before me,
May I walk
With beauty behind me,
May I walk
With beauty above me,
May I walk
With beauty below me,
May I walk
With beauty all around me,
May I walk
Wandering on a trail of beauty,
Lively, I walk.
—American Indian Proverb
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
—Barry Lopez (1945–2020) American Essayist, Fiction Writer
Believe one who knows; you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
—Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) French Catholic Religious Leader
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.
—John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American Naturalist
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of its simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
—Dag Hammarskjold (1905–61) Swedish Statesman, UN Diplomat
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) American Journalist, Political Commentator
The time is almost upon us when a pack-train must wind its way up a graveled highway and turn its bellmare in the pasture of a summer hotel. When that day comes, the pack-train will be dead, the diamond hitch will be merely rope, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger will be names in a history lesson. And thenceforth the march of empire will be a matter of gasoline and four wheel brakes.
—Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American Ecologist, Conservationist
It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism. And this love is excited, primarily, by the beauty of the country.
—J. Horace McFarland (1859–1948) American Conservationist
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
—Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) (1904–91) American Children’s Writer, Cartoonist, Animator
Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.
—Thomas Lovejoy (1941–2021) American Conservation Biologist
My heart is tuned to the quietness that the stillness of nature inspires.
—Pir Hazrat Vilayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi Mystic, Musician
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