Quotes from Edwin Way Teale

For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals 'love' them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.

How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.

Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature's finest balm.

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.

How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living .

If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.

Time is the river. We are the islands. Time washes around us and flows away and with it flow fragments of our lives. So, little by little, each island shrinks….But where, who can say, down the long stream of time, are our eroded days deposited?

It is those who have compassion for all life who will best safeguard the life of man. Those who become aroused only when man is endangered become aroused too late. We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life and have it habitable for ourselves. It is the conservationist who is concerned with the welfare of all the land and life of the country, who, in the end, will do most to maintain the world as a fit place for human existence.

Eliminate the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

The "dead of winter" ----- how much more dead it would be each year without the birds!