Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

If the water is too clear, there is nothing for the fish to eat.

All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.

All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments. Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.

Now, if you notice how the swan, putting its neck down into the deep water, brings up food for itself from below, then you will discover the wisdom of the Creator, in that He gave it a neck longer than its feet for this reason, that it might, as if lowering a sort of fishing line, procure the food hidden in the deep water.

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

Nature is based on harmony. So it says if we want to survive and become more like nature, then we actually have to understand that it's cooperation versus competition.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

Self-defence is Nature's eldest law.

Even if one tree falls down it wouldn't affect the entire forest.

Nature conserves, prefers novelty.

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.

Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.

The sea is a place where every day, half the population eats the other half.

Nature is a beautiful thing - it does what it needs to do when it needs to do it.

Sometimes you have to shield, and sometimes you have to press.

Life feeds on life... feeds on life feeds on life... this is neccesary... this is necessary life feeds on life... feeds on life

Evolution is like walking on a rolling barrel. The walker isn't so much interested in where the barrel is going as he is in keeping on top of it.

I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient. Wild nature is everything we're struggling to regain.

In Nature there is no dirt, everything is in the right condition; the swamp and the worm, as well as the grass and the bird,-all is there for itself.

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.