American Naturalist Quotes

John James Audubon

John Muir

Roy Chapman Andrews

William Bartram

John Burroughs

Susan Fenimore Cooper

Joseph Wood Krutch

Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity. Of all the works of the creation which know the changes of life and death, the trees of the forest have the longest existence.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

The Kingdom of Nature is a literal Kingdom. Order and beauty, law and dependence, are seen everywhere. Amidst the great diversity of the forms of life, there is unity; and this suggests that there is one general plan, but carried out in a variety of ways.

When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me.

When a number of closely related varieties and species, occupying adjoining districts of very limited extent, come under observation, the problems connected with the origin of species are liable to be forced upon us.

Learn to use an axe, and respect it and you can't help but love it. But abuse one and it will wear your hands raw and open your foot like an overcooked sausage.

Richard Proenneke

For what are the whales being killed? For a few hundred jobs and products that are not needed, since there are cheap substitutes. If this continues, it will be the end of living and the beginning of survival. The world is being totaled.

George Schaller

Of all the astronomical events, the fall of a meteorite is the most unnerving and yet the most reassuring. Reassuring because it proves to us that the depths of space are inhabited by bodies made of the same elements we have here on earth, that, at rock bottom, a man and a star are built of the same stuff.

Donald Culross Peattie

The essence of nature guiding is to travel gracefully rather than arrive

Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth; it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.

Roy Chapman Andrews

More birds have adapted to a changing world than have failed. Very few have the narrow tolerance of the ivory-billed woodpecker or the Bachman's warbler.

Roger Tory Peterson

The vast ice-engine that we call a glacier is almost as silent as the slumbering rocks, and, to all but the eye of science, nearly as immobile, save where it discharges into the sea. It is noisy in its dying, but in the height of its power it is as still as the falling snow of which it is made.

Today I had lunch in the city with two scientists, a botanist and an ichthyologist. The botanist said he never kept a garden and the ichthyologist said he never went fishing.

Edwin Way Teale

The whole concept of 'wild' was decidedly European, one not shared by the original inhabitants of this continent. What we called 'wilderness' was to the Indian a homeland, 'abiding loveliness' in Salish or Piegan. The land was not something to be feared or conquered, and 'wildlife' were neither wild nor alien; they were relatives.

The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.

Turkeys, quails, and small birds, are here to be seen; but birds are not numerous in desart forests; they draw near to the habitations of men, as I have constantly observed in all my travels.

William Bartram

He who is desirous of instruction ought not to disdain listening to any one, who has knowledge to communicate, however humble may be his lot, or however limited his talents.

John James Audubon

The question "How many legs does a normal man have?" should be answered by finding a statistical average. And since some men have only one leg, or none, this would lead inevitably to the conclusion that a "normal" man is equipped with one and some fraction legs.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Bats eat so much food each evening that they have weighed in at as much as 50 percent heavier after one night's dining.

Nature seems to have gathered them from all the world as specimens of her rarest fountains, to show in one place what she can do.

Sometime afterward, a terrible misfortune occurred which was in no way calculated to allay the superstitious fears of the ignorant. As some eight or ten citizens were returning with the ferry-boat which had crossed the last Mormons over the Missouri river, into Clay county, the district selected for their new home, the craft filled with water and sunk in the middle of the current; by which accident three or four men were drowned! It was owing perhaps to the craziness of the boat, yet some persons suspected the Mormons of having scuttled it by secretly boring auger-holes in the bottom just before they had left it.