Everyday is Earth Day - Quotations to Live by

Living with Nature - School on Blog

Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.

Lesson: Here are 20 quotations from proverbs and famous people for us to analyze and reflect regarding Reverence for Life and the Environment.

Assignment: Interpret each quotation, provide an appropriate illustration or photograph. Why don't you make posters out of these quotations for your home, school and community?

Use them in your assignments and reports, in meetings and conferences.

Add on to the list, and have a ready compilation. You may add your own.

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Rock Pool, acrylic (11"x14") AVR

We can't live in an environment like a

rock pool detached from the ecosystem.

1. Nature is the art of God.

~ Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635

2. When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. ~Joseph Wood Krutch

3. Only when the last tree has been cut down,

Only when the last river has been poisoned,
Only when the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

— Cree Indian Prophecy

4. Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

~ Jonas Salk , American physician and microbiologist

5. A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.

— Franklin Delano Roosevelt

6. It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

— Jimmy Carter

7. Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature. ~Dave Foreman, Harper's

8.. Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

— Jacques Cousteau

9. If you want one year of prosperity, plant corn.
If you want ten years of prosperity, plant trees.
If you want one hundred years of prosperity, educate people."

— Chinese proverb

10. Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

~Charles A. Lindbergh

11. The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

12. Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

13. To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.

~Buddha

14. There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.

~Brooke, Medicine Eagle

15. When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.

~David Orr

16. When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

~John Muir

17. The good news is we know what to do. The good news is, we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need; more are being developed. And as they become available and become more affordable when produced in scale, they will make it easier to respond. But we should not wait, we cannot wait, we must not wait.

— Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

18. You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

— Mahatma Gandhi

19.Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

~ Albert Einstein ~

20.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

— Mother Teresa

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

~ Albert Einstein

Acknowledgment: Professor Cris Paner of University of Santo Tomas for providing us these valuable quotations.