One I have included in my iNat profile, and probably listed by others, or other quotes by Mary Oliver “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ― Mary Oliver
Another one that resonates with me and I always shared with students is
One essential event or presence can save a child, can flower in her and claim her for its own…**
I attribute the opening of my heart to one clump of pitcher plants that still survives on the backside of my father’s junkyard. I know in now to be the hooded species, *Sarracenia minor, that sends the red bonnets of its traps knee-high out of soggy ground. In spring it blooms loose, yellow, exotic tongues."
Janisse Ray Ecology of a Cracker Childhoodemphasized text
“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.” (Jacques-Yves Cousteau)
and
“There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.” (Charlotte Eriksson)
I found these off a site a couple of weeks ago. I like the second one because half the time I’m photographing birds through my windows
Your quote from Lao Tzu is one of my favourites as well. A close second:
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods” - on why hiking and days out could be quiet even when in company. This whole exerpt from Byron’s Childe Harold is lovely:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
“Somewhere, always, the sun is rising, and somewhere, always, the birds are singing. As spring and summer oscillate between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, so, too, does this singing planet pour forth song, like a giant player piano, in the north, then the south, and back again, as it has now for the 150 million years since the first birds appeared.”
From the book, “The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong” by Dr. Donald Kroodsma.
There is a long running issue in Britain of whether badgers spread tuberculosis to cattle, and whether killing all the badgers in an area is a good way to solve the problem. After a lecture to North Wales farmers a few years ago, the chairman of the farming union announced “We need a cull. We mustn’t get deflected by the science.”
From Mark Twain’s description of a jackrabbit in Roughing It: “But one must shoot at this creature once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the best he knows how. He is frightened clear through now, and he lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yardstick every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy indifference that is enchanting.”
Same book, Twain on the changing of seasons: “Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. Each season brings a world of ejoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces - and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature each season, in turn, seems the loveliest.”
And from Henry Beston, The Outermost House: " For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
I like this quote very much- "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads"By Henry David Thoreau and another one “Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible god and destroys a visible nature, unaware that this nature he’s destroying is this god he’s worshiping.”By Hubert Reeves
One of my favourites:
There is a way
That nature speaks,
That land speaks.
Most of the time
We are simply not patient enough
To pay attention to the story.
Ohh Im not sure I can provide a quote but I saw this meme on discord about I think russian cubs and it was the guy that voices most documentaries. He was talking about the life of the cubs and everything but instead of it being the cubs they were russian people. It was so cute and wholesome
