“The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts.”
John Muir
HumilityAll Life
Environmental Quotes
200 FAMOUS QUOTES · ENVIRONMENTAL
Environmental Quotes
Read 200 of the best environmental quotes about nature, conservation, pollution and protecting the planet, from John Muir, Thoreau, Roosevelt and more.
“Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?”
John Muir
HumilityEcology
“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! how blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!”
John Muir
Animal RightsCompassion
“The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature.”
John Muir
BiodiversityEvery Creature Matters
“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf.”
Henry David Thoreau
ObservationWonder
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau
Simple LivingSustainability
“Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.”
Henry David Thoreau
EarthRespect
“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, I become a transparent eye-ball.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
ConnectionNature
“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
SkyBeauty
“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
ChangeNature
“Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
RespectWisdom
“Nature teaches more than she preaches.”
John Burroughs
Learning From NatureWisdom
“When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished.”
Theodore Roosevelt
ExtinctionLoss
“It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature.”
Theodore Roosevelt
ProtectionBeauty
“The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established.”
George Perkins Marsh
BalanceHuman Impact
“After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
LossFuture Generations
“Have I not reason to lament what man has made of man?”
William Wordsworth
Human ImpactReflection
“'Nature' is what we see - the Hill - the Afternoon - Squirrel - Eclipse - the Bumble bee.”
Emily Dickinson
NatureSimplicity
“Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees that half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees.”
Rudyard Kipling
GardeningHumility
“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
Kahlil Gibran
TreesPoetry
“The kingdom is a spirit-like thing, and cannot be got by active doing. He who would so win it destroys it.”
Lao Tzu
HarmonyRestraint
“The earth receives us at our birth, nourishes us when born, and ever after supports us; lastly, embracing us in her bosom when we are rejected by the rest of nature.”
Pliny the Elder
Mother EarthGratitude
“This was among my prayers: a piece of land not so very large, which would contain a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and beyond these a bit of wood.”
Horace
Simple LivingLand
“O farmers, too happy, if only they knew their blessings!”
Virgil
FarmingGratitude
“Of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful.”
Cicero
FarmingWork