A Pause For Beauty


One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture,
and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
- Goethe

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Reflections On Wild Nature

Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth: her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirits in her solitary places.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Prophets do not come from cities, promising riches and store clothes. They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice and telling of a different sort of treasure.
- Andrew Lyttle

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
- George Washington Carver

To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage. . . There is not as much wilderness out there as I wish there were. There is more inside than you think.
- David Brower (American environmentalist and mountaineer, founder of the Sierra Club)

These are islands in time -- with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind. In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting.
- Harvey Broome (Co-founder of The Wilderness Society)

The earth
laughs in flowers.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blends become as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerets at the center; become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with a squirrel!
- Sally Carrighar, Home to the Wilderness

I never knew a man who took a bedroll into an Idaho mountainside and slept there under a star-studded summer sky who felt self-important that next morning.
- Frank Church (Democratic Idaho Senator (1957-1981))

I am in love with this world. I have nestled lovingly in it. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.
- John Burroughs

I have learned a lot from trees;
Sometimes about the weather,
Sometimes about animals,
Sometimes about the Great Spirits.
- Tatanga Mani "Walking Buffalo" (Chief of the Nakoda, medicine man, naturalist, and peace advocate)

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.
-
Mollie Beatty, Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service (1993-1996))

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