Quotes by Conservationists - Page 2

There is simply no issue more important. Conservation is the preservation of human life on earth, and that, above all else, is worth fighting for.
Rob Stewart
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?
Rachel Carson
We mask our needs as the needs of others.
Terry Tempest Williams
The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba’athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.
Lawrence Anthony
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
Beatrix Potter
Did I have the courage to forge a path
Terry Tempest Williams
But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here.
Terry Tempest Williams
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up--ever--trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?
Terry Tempest Williams
Agitation gives birth to creation.
Terry Tempest Williams
If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.
Terry Tempest Williams
Here is the world. It is not a safe place, but however frightening and bewildering life may become, we can survive our fears, grab them by the wolf ’s tail as Peter did, and make peace with the world.
Terry Tempest Williams
Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these fo
Rachel Carson
Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.
Terry Tempest Williams
We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself.We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy.The land holds stories.
Terry Tempest Williams
Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath. . . . Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.
Terry Tempest Williams
Respect is primary.
Terry Tempest Williams
Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.
Terry Tempest Williams
Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.
Lydia Millet
I have no fear of losing my life - if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.
Steve Irwin
Stories require faith, not facts.
T.A. Barron
What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?
Terry Tempest Williams
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
Richard E. Leakey
An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.
Richard E. Leakey
What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine. When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breath. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.
Terry Tempest Williams
Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic. Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be.
Lydia Millet
When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.
Terry Tempest Williams
I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.
Richard E. Leakey
Mammals require three essentials in life, identity, stimulation, and security, and by far the most important of these three psychological cornerstones is identity.
David Sheldrick
When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.
Terry Tempest Williams
the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.
Terry Tempest Williams
To write,” Marguerite Duras remarked, “is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.
Terry Tempest Williams
There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.
Terry Tempest Williams
Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains. . . . Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited.
John Graves
Quiet, by its nature, slips away unnoticed. But once it's gone, we notice.
Susan Marsh
Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the Moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges.
Terry Tempest Williams
Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.
Robert Aickman
If, having endured much, we have at last asserted out "right to know," and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.
Rachel Carson
I come to listen to your pain and to hear the stories and memories of a few obsessed citizens. Jerusalem, I come to you in disguise: in over-colourful, immodest clothes and vulgar make-up... The only way I could come to you was in disguise, as a whore.
Suad Amiry
One man’s weakness is another man’s mercy.
Lydia Millet
By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?
Rachel Carson
Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.
Terry Tempest Williams
Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you can see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality.
T.A. Barron
Haven't you noticed by this time that everyone's lives are full of things you can't understand? The exceptional thing is the thing you can understand.
Robert Aickman
Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.
Robert Aickman
No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.
Robert Aickman
I have found what I need most to heal a broken bond is time together—the very thing I avoid is the thing most desired.
Terry Tempest Williams
I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.
Beatrix Potter
…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.
Lydia Millet
Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.
Terry Tempest Williams
When I said, “I am my mother, but I’m not,” I was saying my path would be my own.
Terry Tempest Williams
When it comes to Jews, you have a two-thousand-year memory, but when it comes to us Palestinians, you have a sixty-year amnesia.
Suad Amiry
I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.
Lydia Millet
Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.
Beatrix Potter
The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.
Terry Tempest Williams
Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.
Lydia Millet
Grief dares us to love once more.
Terry Tempest Williams
What amazes me most is that we, as a people, have shared our collective story of being thrown out of our homeland, Palestine, with each other and with many others- actually we have bored the world with this collective story- but somehow the individual Palestinian shies away, or perhaps is too afraid, to share the very personal story of being thrown out of her or his home, living room, or bedroom. These personal stories are seldom told, not even to our own children, perhaps not even to ourselves. I guess the wound remains open.
Suad Amiry
We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.
Terry Tempest Williams
The wild things of this earth are not ours to do with as we please. They have been given to us in trust, and we must account for them to the generation which will come after us and audit our accounts.
William T. Hornaday
Our route toward spiritual evolution is radiantly clear. We all have our own unique individual journey to walk toward enlightenment. Living on the brink of evolutionary change means that new ground is being broken and new consciousness is being raised. Truth is of the essence – we have no dogma, no set formula, no prescribed rules, no false standards to follow. All we have is the truth within our souls. I believe most of us want to follow the light, the path of healing and not destroying our earth, but we don't have the courage, the lion heart, to follow our individual truth toward enlightenment. Giving in to our fears, we bury our “gold” beneath the false value systems of our societies, and we attempt to comfort ourselves with the notion that we have no power or responsibility for what is happening to our world. The reality is that, potentially, we all have the power of light – the White Lion – within us. The very first step is to overcome our fears. Thereafter, our hearts will lead the way.
Linda Tucker