#natur

I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules. ↗

— Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

#nature #plants #life

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings. ↗

— George Orwell

#humanity #saints #scholars #nature

All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut off our feelings and support animal exploitation is rational, given societal expectations and sanctions; but to assert our feelings and oppose animal exploitation is also rational, given the pain involved in losing our natural bonds with animals. So our task is not to pass judgment on others' rationality, but to speak honestly of the loneliness and isolation of anthropocentric society, and of the damage done to every person expected to hurt animals. ↗

— Brian Luke

#animal-rights #emotions #feminism #patriarchy #rationality

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson ↗

— John Steinbeck

#nature

Sexuality should not be seen as dualistic – all good or all bad – but as a good part of our created nature that is constantly in need of repair. ↗

— David Kinnaman

#lust #sexuality #nature

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. ↗

— George Gordon Byron

#realization #love

As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. ↗

— Ernst Haeckel

#humble #nature #realisation #nature

The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books that, in their day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They were entitled to become authorities in their own right. In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author. ↗

— Mortimer J. Adler

#nature

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity. ↗

— John Fowles

#nature #nature-of-man #nature

It came as naturally to him as breathing or lying, or worse. His mama had only taught her son to be cautious at all times. Garnette was more than that. Much, much more than that. ↗

— V.S. Carnes

#lie #nature