#ants

One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores. ↗

— Douglas Tallamy

#conservation #diversity #endangered #extinction #gardening

Children and babies should be held in the most sacred regard. We feel that they're the most natural and true magicians. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#magic #magick #occult #satanism #nature

Servants ran to wake the young king, Tamar, already awake and watching from his balcony. Curious, naturally. Not altogether pleased. No more than anyone would be, jolted out of a sound sleep by unexpected elephants. ↗

— Lloyd Alexander

#humor #nature

Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers. Bacon, Descartes, Newton — these tutors of the human race had no need of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led them to those places where their vast genius carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have limited their understanding by confining it to their own narrow capabilities. With the first obstacles, they learned to exert themselves and made the effort to traverse the immense space they moved through. If it is necessary to permit some men to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone in those men's footsteps and to move beyond them. It is the task of this small number of people to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#descartes #genius #giants #newton #progress

A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them. ↗

— Frank O'Connor

#religion #schism #religion

Andrew just shrugged, and I fiddled with the napkin in my lap while glancing idly around the restaurant. The obligatory mirrors hung on the walls, and there was one of those fountains with fake lily pads in the entryway. The restaurant was also lit like a mine shaft. I've never understood why dim lighting is supposed to be so romantic. Night vision belongs into a Paris Hilton sex tape - not in a restaurant that could potentially poison me with peanut sauce. ↗

— Alicia Thompson

#restaurants #sarcasm #romantic

These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity. ↗

— Orlando Figes

#populists #respect

The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he experienced the everyday life of the peasant, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric. ↗

— Orlando Figes

#romantic

Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due. ↗

— Amor Towles

#new-york-city #socialites #new-york-city

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#depression #heartbreak #mental-health #psychiatry #psychotherapy