Happy Earth Day

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.

DAVE E. SMALLEY

The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man’s litter has more permanence.

JOHN STEINBECK

We ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household belongings, which when worn with use we throw away.

PLUTARCH

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

CHARLES DICKENS

How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us. Stay close to the heart of nature and forget this troubled world. Remember, there is nothing wrong with nature; the trouble is in ourselves.

PARKS COUSINS

Animals have these advantages over man: they have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

VOLTAIRE

We talk of mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.

CLARENCE DAY

Nature cares nothing for our logic, our human logic; she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crunched under its wheel.

IVAN TURGENEV

In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and present, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.

JOHN MILTON

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

MARJORIE K. RAWLINGS

Life in the country teaches one that the really stimulating things are the quiet, natural things, and the really worrisome things are the noisy, unnatural things. It is more exciting to stand still than to dance. Silence is more eloquent than speech. Water is more stimulating than wine. Fresh air is more intoxicating than cigarette smoke. Sunlight is more subtle than electric light. The scent of grass is more luxurious than the most expensive perfume. The slow, simple observations of the peasant are more wise than the most sparkling epigrams of the latest wit.

BEVERLEY NICHOLS

Intense study of nature, her secrets and her glories, will humble the meanest spirit.

CHARLES B. ROGERS

Children are not a distraction from important work. They are the most important work. In the end, the legacy that matters won’t be what you built, it will be who you raised and whether they felt safe, seen, and loved in your presence.

C.S. LEWIS