Edwin Way Teale Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

Edwin Way Teale
Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

Edwin Way Teale
Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Edwin Way Teale
In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Edwin Way Teale
How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.

Edwin Way Teale
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
Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.

Edwin Way Teale
For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.

Edwin Way Teale
If insects had the gift of speech, as we understand it, I am sure a main topic of conversation would begin: "Let me tell you about my molt."

Edwin Way Teale
If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.

Edwin Way Teale
The city man, in his neon-and-mazda glare, knows nothing of nature's midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age-old night.

Edwin Way Teale
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

Edwin Way Teale
The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues - self-restraint.

Edwin Way Teale
How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!

Edwin Way Teale
I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun.

Edwin Way Teale
The world's favorite season is the spring.
All things seem possible in May.

Edwin Way Teale
Time and space—time to be alone, space to move about—these may well be the greatest scarcities of tomorrow.

Edwin Way Teale
Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.

Edwin Way Teale
Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.

Edwin Way Teale
For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

Edwin Way Teale
Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.

Edwin Way Teale
Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.

Edwin Way Teale
How many beautiful trees gave their lives that today's scandal should, without delay, reach a million readers.

Edwin Way Teale
You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!

Edwin Way Teale