Herbert Read Quotes

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

I love nature, but I try to change it a little bit, not copy it.

Do no dishonour to the earth least you dishonour the spirit of man.

We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.

Any living thing that hopes to live on the earth must fit into the ecosphere or perish.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

Conservation’s grand challenge is to save nature in a world that will soon have 9 billion hungry, thirsty, energy-using people.

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are ... bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both ... at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included.

There is no better designer then nature

It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.

It has been my experience that people who are at cross-purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves.

Among the innumerable Footsteps of Divine Providence to be found in the Works of Nature, there is a very remarkable one to be observed in the exact Balance that is maintained, between the Numbers of Men and Women; for by this means it is provided, that the Species may never fail, nor perish, since every Male may have its Female, and of a proportionable Age.

Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, labor in vain.

Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.

There are a great many people who are in favor of conservation no matter what it means.

I’ve become obsessed with the idea of reconciliation, particularly reconciliation with nature but with people too, of course. I think that travel has been a kind of search for that, a pursuit for unity and even an attempt to contribute to a sense of unity.

It must be acknowledged that an increasing proportion of the world's population is living in cities, in almost completely human-made environments. But we should also acknowledge that there are still a considerable number of people who wish to live in harmony with nature, and that globalization has made their ways of life increasing difficult to sustain.

Since we are part of nature...we empathize deeply with its ways... they serve as models of how things should be.

We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the Earth while we expand our culture's capacity for joy.