Lewis Thomas Quotes

I don't believe in the separation between mankind and nature. Mankind is nature.

If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.

Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep and most important parts of ourself.

The environment is everything that isn't me.

The most important principle of environment is that you are not the only element.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

A large body of literature suggests that wellbeing is intimately linked to attachment - not only to other people, but also to the natural world.

When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.

Nature is so phenomenal.

It is funny how we talk about nature as this separate entity when we are nature, and nature is us.

Nature is actually the greatest democracy in the world.

Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.

I think having pets helps sensitize people to the natural world.

A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

We are all part of the ecosystem.

Nature is to be found in her entirety nowhere more than in her smallest creatures.

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

There is no solitude in nature.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.