Nature Conservation Quotes

• Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Nature

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  Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

  Margaret Mead

  Inspirational, Life, Friendship

  Margaret Mead, Robert B. Textor (2005). “The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future”, p.12, Berghahn Books

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• Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.

  William Wordsworth

  Life, Education, Teacher

  William Wordsworth (1837). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works ...”, p.337

  61 Copy quote

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• We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children

  Chief Seattle

  Motivational, Wisdom, Peace

  294 Copy quote

• When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

  John Muir

  Inspirational, Peace, Nature

  72 Copy quote

• Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Inspirational, Life, Stay Strong

  "The Wright Style". Book by Carla Lind, p. 3, 1992.

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

  E. B. White

  Time, Nature, Fall

  77 Copy quote
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  We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

  Aldo Leopold

  Inspiring, Respect, Nature

  A Sand County Almanac foreword (1949)

  121 Copy quote

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  Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

  John Muir

  Life, Strength, Beauty

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.814, Library of America

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• We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

  Margaret Mead

  Nature, Carpe Diem, Society

  28 Copy quote

• He who plants a tree, plants a hope.

  Lucy Larcom

  Nature, Garden, Tree

  43 Copy quote

• Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

  Aldo Leopold

  Nature, Men, Land

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.145, Oxford University Press

  46 Copy quote

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

  John Muir

  Nature, Adventure, Garden

  John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Henry Bugbee Kane (2001). “The Wilderness World of John Muir”, p.312, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."

  Ursula Goodenough

  Environmental, Understanding Love, End Of The World

  13 Copy quote

• The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.

  Philip Shabecoff

  Nature, Environmental, Bombs

  61 Copy quote

• How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?

  Charles Lindbergh

  Wall, Men, Wind

  "Aviation, Geography, and Race". Reader's Digest, pp. 64-67, November 1939.

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• Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat-glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?

  Frank N. Ikard

  Morning, Children, Animal

  70 Copy quote

• When you defile the pleasant streams,
  And the wild bird's abiding place,
  You massacre a million dreams,
  And cast your spittle in God's face

  John Drinkwater

  Dream, Nature, Bird

  John Drinkwater (1919). “Poems, 1908-1919”

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• It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.

  Bernard DeVoto

  Nature, Fall, Swans

  22 Copy quote

• Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

  Gil Scott-Heron

  Nature, Men, Lakes

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  Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
  For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
  America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
  And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

  George Carlin

  Beautiful, Song, Nature

  "Class Clown". Comedy album by George Carlin, 1972.

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• There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased; and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Mean, Delight, Development

  Theodore Roosevelt (1955). “Theodore Roosevelt's America: Selections from the Writings of the Oyster Bay Naturalist”

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• Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment.

  Rene Dubos

  Men, Decision, Tree

  9 Copy quote

• When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Saving The Earth, Mother Earth

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, Waldo Emerson Forbes (1913). “Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872 [1876] Ed”

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• We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.

  Thomas Fuller

  Ocean, Sea, Oil And Water

  "Gnomologia". Book by Thomas Fuller, 1732.

  304 Copy quote

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