It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world — Nature — is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.

—Edward Abbey

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this lovingly, knowingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it greedily, clumsily, ignorantly, destructively, it is a desecration. By such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

—Wendell Berry

There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more; the other is to desire less.

—G.K. Chesterton

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

—Socrates

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

—Hal Borland

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

 —William Shakespeare, As You Like It

 

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

—Mark Twain

 

What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable to the Creator, but if we are unaffected, wherein lies the meaning?

—Henry Miller

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity.

—Wallace Stegner

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we created but by what we refused to destroy.

—John Sawhill

Sooner or later, we sit down to a banquet of consequences.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

—Charles Kettering

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

–Marshall McLuhan

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

—E.B. White