Patrick Geddes Quotes

A tree is an incomprehensible mystery.

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.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

We are dependent not so much on Earth, the third planet orbiting the sun, as on Gaea, the integrated system that includes, sustains and is shaped by life.

Vegetation is the basic instrument the creator uses to set all of nature in motion.

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves.

For the lakhs living along its banks, the Aghanashini has given people life and livelihoods.

All I want to do is to present the abundance of life on Earth.

The planet's forests are essential for life.

Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption.

I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity.

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.

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.

Looking at the pond, all I could think was that it is an incredivle thing, how a whole world can rise from what seems like nothing at all.

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

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.

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant . . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.

We are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone.

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

Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself-or that if it did not, the consequences were someone else's problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.