Quotes About Balance

When you fall asleep after a big lunch you're really just saving up energy to work off all the calories later on.

If people had to spend all of every day getting enough food to eat like animals, they wouldn't have time to make aeroplanes or bombs.

You're not standing on your head! Have a cookie. - Grimspite in Jinx on the Divide

A book for the general reader on an esoteric subject has to argue for its own interestingness by being interesting. And never argue for its own importance, which a work of scholarship may do. I consider the balancing act of "being accessible" a discipline rather than a limitation.

Look,' Taryn said. 'I'm going to try this one more time. It's like that thing in Star Trek. The Starfleet regulation that says the doctor can relieve the captain of his duties. The writers probably got it from the real-life navy. Anyway, human beings are the captain. The doctor is the trees and the grasses and the marshes, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air. We humans were declared unfit for command.

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

every year more non-indigenous species of mammals, birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards, and snakes are brought into the U.S. than the country has native species of these groups.

It demonstrates, he has written, that humans "are capable of driving virtually any large mammal species extinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

Such is the economy of nature," he wrote, "that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.

The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

When a mass extinction occurs, it takes out the weak and also lays low the strong.

might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

When you find one thing that depends on something else that, in turn depends on something else, the whole series of interactions depends on constancy.

Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.

Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything" Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it... We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.

succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

Festina Lente (Hurry in slowly)

So much of the sorry state of our world hangs on the excess of the so-called masculine virtues in our guiding storylines.