#iron

There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence. ↗

— Malcolm Muggeridge

#mystery #nature

We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops. ↗

— Paul Brooks

#nature

Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here? We must bear witness. ↗

— Joni L. James

#landscape #nature #wildness #nature

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#nature

The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that I've encountered to date. ↗

— Karen Davis

#environmentalism #farm-animals #nature #dating

Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray. ↗

— John Paul II

#culture #earth #ecology #god #nature

That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents. ↗

— Ursula Hegi

#irony #love #parenting #love

Where do we record the passing of wildlife? Who mourns the silent deaths of the small? ↗

— O.R. Melling

#environment #sad #death

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible...Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#humor #irony #morality #principles #writing

Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves." "You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least. ↗

— Jane Austen

#hysteria #irony #nerves #sarcasm #respect