Natural World Quotes - Page 13

• Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.

  Bill Mollison

  Deep Understanding, World, Wealth

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

  Bill Mollison

  Thinking, World, Natural

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• If you look at the natural world, really look at it, it's always magical.

  Theodora Goss

  Looks, World, Natural

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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• Even those who specialize in the history of philosophy often ignore the political and cultural context, and the natural world in which their philosophers were philosophizing. This has consequences both trivial and important. If you systematically read the last fifty years of the major journals in our discipline you would be amazed at the amount of redundancy. Most of this is unacknowledged because most of us know so little about the history of our discipline and even the subfields in which we work.

  Dale Jamieson

  Philosophy, Years, Discipline

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Character, Different, World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.

  Bill McKibben

  Important, Church, Mountain

  Source: theotherjournal.com

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• I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.

  Bill McKibben

  Loss, Thinking, People

  Source: www.wolverinefarm.org

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• [Jay] Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.

  Richard Dawkins

  Wall, Believe, Opportunity

  Source: inters.org

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• My wish list is pretty short. I wish that we had empathy. As a society, we are so wrapped up in our own artificial creations that we have become disconnected from one another and the wonder of our natural world. I truly believe that empathy is the key to solving the majority of our environmental and social problems.

  Adrian Grenier

  Believe, Empathy, Wish

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

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• Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.

  Susan Orlean

  Space, Texture, World

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• Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things

  Ann Voskamp

  Different, World, Natural

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• Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible though very unlikely that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  World, Materialism, Reason

  Jerry A. Coyne (2009). “Why Evolution is True”, p.245, Oxford University Press, USA

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• In the last 10 years, children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs. ... But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology.

  Shilo Shiv Suleman

  Children, Technology, Years

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• One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

  James D. Watson

  Father, Sacrifice, Fate

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• Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains. . . . Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited.

  John Graves

  Morning, Land, Silence

  John Graves (1960). “Goodbye to a river: a narrative”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• Man has sought to take from the natural world not only that which is necessary for his stability and survival, but often seeks to satisfy his perceived and ultimately false psychological needs, such as his need for self-display, luxuries and the like. Twenty percent of humanity consumes eighty percent of the world's wealth and is accountable for an equal percentage of the world's ecological catastrophes.

  Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople

  Men, Self, Luxury

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• The trend lines in research and innovation look good for places such as India and China and less good for America as we go forward. So even if you're not enchanted by the prospect of cosmic discovery, the prospect of dying poor may be what it takes to understand the role of this adventure in the future of the natural world in which we live.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Adventure, America, Discovery

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• You can have a strong economy or you can help the environment, but you can't do both at the same time. That's ridiculous. In fact, as a sustainable vision for a healthy economy has to involve changing our energy policy and changing with respect to the natural world. Because we're hitting nature's thresholds, we're hitting nature's limits with respect to water and crop yields and energy use and fossil fuels heating the atmosphere at the same time we're past global peak and running out of that.

  James Cameron

  Running, Strong, Past

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• If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world?

  Bill McKibben

  Offering, Order, Television

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• Surely knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the human condition, knowledge of the nature and dynamics of society, knowledge of the past so that one may use it in experiencing the present and aspiring to the future--all of these, it would seem reasonable to suppose, are essential to an educated man. To these must be added another--knowledge of the products of our artistic heritage that mark the history of our esthetic wonder and delight.

  Jerome Bruner

  Education, Past, Men

  Jerome Seymour Bruner (1979). “On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand”, p.122, Harvard University Press

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• Certainly in order to understand the natural world one needs clarity, logic, and the capacity for theory building. But that understanding tends to improve because and to the extent that it is provisional, hypothetical, when it looks for disconfirmation in the particular rather than final proof as a universal.

  Talal Asad

  Order, Understanding, Finals

  "Do Muslims Belong in the West? An Interview with Talal Asad". Interview with Hasan Azad, www.eutopiainstitute.org. February 13, 2015.

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• For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Eye, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.386, Penguin

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• When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Thinking, Smartphones, Dumb

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• If we do not appreciate the sensitivity and subtlety of the human heart, how can we appreciate the sensitivity and subtlety of the natural world?

  Sakyong Mipham

  Heart, Appreciate, World

  Sakyong Mipham (2013). “The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity's Hidden Treasure”, p.41, Harmony

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• All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Men, Humanity, Understanding

  "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins". Book by Konrad Lorenz, 1973.

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