Natural World Quotes - Page 3

• Remember, as each man and woman is a microcosm reflecting the larger natural world, so healing of the self is also a healing for the world. As above, so below.

  Brian Froud

  Healing, Men, Self

  Brian Froud, Jessica Macbeth (2000). “Faeries' Oracle”, p.187, Simon and Schuster

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• The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

  Thomas Berry

  World, Language, Natural

  Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker (2009). “The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century”, p.145, Columbia University Press

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• Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Reality, Clouds

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• There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.

  Bill Mollison

  Hands, Water, People

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• We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, World, Natural

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• Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

  Michael Pollan

  Long, Community, Together

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.16, Penguin

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• Religion is a belief in supernatural entities or forces that have an effect on the natural world - A belief in forces that are invisible, intangible, inaudible and otherwise undetectable by any natural means.

  Greta Christina

  Mean, Religion, World

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• The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

  Stephen Wolfram

  Science, Years, Mathematical Equations

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• I grew up with a house full of dogs. My mother was a great nature lover and taught us to have almost a religious sense of respect for the natural world.

  Glenn Close

  Mother, Dog, Religious

  "Glenn Close Talks Seafood, Swimming With Sharks And Saving The Planet". Interview with Katherine Goldstein, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 15, 2010.

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• Many people think they are too refined, or too rational, to entertain a real sense of wonder in themselves or in others. This is preposterous to me, since the natural world is full of endless wonders, both on Earth and especially in space, no matter how you think it was created.

  Garry Kasparov

  Real, Thinking, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atmosphere. At that point, it became clear that humans were affecting our environments far more profoundly than we realized. By releasing so much carbon and greenhouse gas into the environment, we're making long-term changes to every aspect of the natural world.

  Annalee Newitz

  Carbon Cycle, Long, Atmosphere

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's only a slight exaggeration to say we haven't progressed much beyond the invention of agriculture when it comes to our view of the natural world.

  Annalee Newitz

  Views, Agriculture, World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence that we have been domesticating crops and animals for at least 15,000 years, adapting ecosystems to our preferred way of life.

  Annalee Newitz

  Animal, Years, Ecosystems

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Annalee Newitz

  Years, World, Evolution

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.

  W. S. Merwin

  Hate, War, Ideas

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings.

  Peter Singer

  Benefits, World, Tradition

  Peter Singer (1993). “Practical Ethics”, p.267, Cambridge University Press

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• There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order.

  Max Planck

  Real, Independent, Men

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• Which is so important, I mean, that's what's so great about the books, is, you know, those two worlds are sort of, the slacker world of just comedy and laziness and then this crazy, over the top action, supernatural world, and you know, combined.

  Mary Elizabeth Winstead

  Crazy, Book, Mean

  Source: collider.com

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• Through scientific discovery and technological innovation, we enlist the forces of the natural world to solve many of the uniquely human problems we face - feeding and providing energy to agrowing population, improving human health, taking responsibility for protecting the environment and the global ecosystem, and ensuring our own Nation's security. Scientific discoveries inspire and enrich us, teaching us about the mysteries of life and the nature of the world.

  William J. Clinton

  Teaching, Responsibility, Ecosystems

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• It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.

  Annalee Newitz

  Past, Civilization, Carbon Cycle

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't know if most people have truly taken on board what this says about our place in the natural world. It doesn't mean that humans are dominating the Earth, ruling over all of nature. In fact, it is a reminder that we are only a tiny part of nature, at the mercy of a system whose operations predate us by billions of years, and will continue billions of years after we're gone.

  Annalee Newitz

  Taken, Mean, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm culturally Jewish but, like most scientists, an atheist: I don't believe there's a God or supernatural world. Buddhism offers guidance on what to do in a world without God: It opines that truly being present in the world‚ experiencing and hanging out with your loved ones, provides all the significance you could want.

  Alison Gopnik

  Atheist, Believe, Buddhism

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I take facts about reasons to be fundamental in two ways. First, I believe that facts about reasons are not reducible to or analyzable in terms of facts of other kind, such as facts about the natural world. Second, I believe that reasons are the fundamental elements of the normative domain, and other normative notions, such as goodness and moral right and wrong can be explained in terms of reasons.

  T. M. Scanlon

  Believe, World, Moral

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.

  T. M. Scanlon

  Real, Believe, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Throughout all of human history we have consumed the natural world. All creatures do. Birds do. Fish do. Earthworms do. We consume the natural world as a source of our survival. But no creature has ever consumed at the scale that humans have, and now there are seven billion of us. I think the good news is that a large percentage of those seven billion minds can work to make better decisions.

  Sylvia Earle

  Thinking, Bird, Decision

  Source: www.wildriverreview.co

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