Edwin Way Teale > Quotes

“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.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year

“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.”
― Edwin Way Teale

“Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life and the labors of life reduce themselves.”
― Edwin Way Teale

“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.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year

“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.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year

“The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues--self-restraint. Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream? Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower? Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same. My act will be multiplied endlessly. To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty, everyone has to deny himself proportionately. Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year

“If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year

“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.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year

“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.”
― Edwin Way Teale

“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?”
― Edwin Way Teale, Journey into Summer: A Naturalist's Record of a 19,000-Mile Journey through the North American Summer

“Eliminate the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.”
― Edwin Way Teale

“Here in this wild and beautiful spot amid the mountains, the dark woods, the rising mist, the new moon hanging above the silhouettes of the peaks, we waited, in spite of the night chill, until the last sunlight of the spring had ebbed from the sky.”
― Edwin Way Teale, North With the Spring: A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000-Mile Journey With the North American Spring

“The "dead of winter" ----- how much more dead it would be each year without the birds!”
― Edwin Way Teale, A Walk through the Year

“On the roughest days of winter, when life seems overwhelmed by storm and cold, watch a chickadee, observe in good cheer and take heart.”
― Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter

“Everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere spring had come and gone. The season had swept far to the north; it had climbed mountains; it had passed into the sky. Like a sound, spring spreads and spreads until it is swallowed up in space. Like the wind, it moves across the map invisible; we see it only in its effects. It appears like the tracks of the breeze on a field of wheat, like shadows of wind-blown clouds, like tossing branches that reveal the presence of the invisible, the passing of the unseen. So spring had spread from Georgia to North Carolina, from Virginia to Canada, leaving consequences beyond number in its wake. We longed for a thousand springs on the road instead of this one. For spring is like life. You never grasp it entire; you touch it here, there; you know it only in parts and fragments. Reflecting thus as we started south on that first morning of summer - on the day of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year - we were well aware that it is only on the calendar that spring comes to so sudden a termination. In reality its end is a gradual change. Season merges with season in a slow transition into another life.”
― Edwin Way Teale, North With the Spring: A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000-Mile Journey With the North American Spring

“In nature, everything flows. All is change. In truth, we never cross the same river twice. But the printed page does not change. It is the river we can cross again.”
― Edwin Way Teale, A Walk through the Year

“Bluebird blue....one of the loveliest manifestations of the color blue.”
― Edwin Way Teale, A Walk through the Year

“«من الأمور السيئة أخلاقيًا ألا يهتم المرء بما إذا كان شيء ما صحيحًا أم غير ذلك طالما يجعلنا نحس أننا على ما يرام تمامًا، مثل عدم اهتمامنا بالكيفية التي نحصل بها على المال طالما حصلنا عليه بالفعل»”
― Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year