Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.

The trees are our lungs, the rivers our circulation, the air our breath, and the earth our body.

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.

I want viewers to see that everything is connected, even the little guys like pollinators and flowers.

One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

The earth has a life of its own.

Nature is good at connectivity. The impact of diverse human activities is observed and absorbed throughout nature. Everything is linked. Nature has no problem with coherence. Ecosystems react with their own logic.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

Every thread of creation is held in position by still other strands of things living.

They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.

Those trees are your lungs. The earth recycles as your body. The rivers recycle as your circulation. The air is your breath. So what do we call the environment?

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

We are all part of the ecosystem.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence - and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.

There is no differentiation between all living things: trees, river, animals, and humans.

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

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.