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A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.
Audobon

Nature is the art of God - LA NATURA E L'ARTE DI DIO
Dante Alighieri
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (sec. 16)

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
J.M. Barrie

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.
Bernoulli

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason.
Hal Borland "The Certainty - April 5," Sundial of the Seasons (1964)

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
Rachel Carlson

The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.
Tomas De Quincey, "Preliminary Confessions" (1821- 56)

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the dull mind nature is leaden; To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History" 1841

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard Feynman

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Greek Proverb

Each flower is a soul opening out to nature.
Gérard de Nerval

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
William Hazlitt "On Taste" (1859)

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Victor Hugo

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the wind longs to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson

Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
Aldo Leopold, A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds, Outdoor Life, November 1925. Reproduced in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, edited by David E. Brown & Neil B. Carmony, University of New Mexico Press, 1990, pg. 160-161.

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."
Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 22 December 1967

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man.
Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924) Founder, Success Magazine

When one tugs at a single thing in nature; he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
John Muir

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
John Muir

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
John Muir

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
ISAAC NEWTON

The forest is the poor man's overcoat.
New England Proverb

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keffe

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. .
Georgia O'Keffe

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
Pascal

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
Robert Louis Stevenson

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essentail facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Henry David Thoreau

In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau - speech at Concord Lyceum, 23 April 1851 and subsequently, in Thoreau's essay "Walking", Atlantic Monthly, June 1862 (v.9 no. 56)

Human subtelty will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.
Leonardo da Vinci

"Trees give peace to the souls of men."
Nora Waln correspondent 1895-1964

To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace.
Terry Tempest Williams

Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.
William Wordsworth

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.   William Wordsworth