Henry David Thoreau Quotes

There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.

In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.

We need to go back to our relationship with nature and understand that those trees are our lungs. The earth is recycling as our body. The rivers are our circulation. This air is our breath. And the star stuff, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen that comes from distant galaxies is actually the molecules of your body.

But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.

We're getting closer to our nature.

The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences.

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature ...

Nature is actually the greatest democracy in the world.

Nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.

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

Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.

When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ... The whole wilderness is unity and interrelation, is alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.

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

A land ethic for tomorrow should...stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

A man is related to all nature.

It turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go.

Man is embedded in nature.

There is a deep interconnectedness of all life on earth, from the tiniest organisms, to the largest ecosystems, and absolutely between each person.

We are connected to each other not only as humans, but to every living thing on the planet.

Nature is cruel but we don't have to be

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the angels.

The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature.