Edwin Way Teale Quotes

#1. To those whom the tree, the birds, the wildflowers represent only "locked-up dollars" have never known or really seen these things.

Edwin Way Teale

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

Edwin Way Teale

#3. Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.

Edwin Way Teale

#4. The world's favorite season is the spring.
All things seem possible in May.

Edwin Way Teale

#5. Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.

Edwin Way Teale

#6. 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

#7. The measure of an enthusiasm must be taken between interesting events. It is between bites that the lukewarm angler loses heart.

Edwin Way Teale

#8. A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.

Edwin Way Teale

#9. Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.

Edwin Way Teale

#10. 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

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

Edwin Way Teale

#12. Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.

Edwin Way Teale

#13. It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.

Edwin Way Teale

#14. For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.

Edwin Way Teale

#15. If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.

Edwin Way Teale

#16. Whenever there is an organized movement to persuade people to believe or do something, whenever an effort is made to "propagate" a creed or set of opinions or convictions or to make people act as we want them to act, the means employed are called propaganda.

Edwin Way Teale

#17. To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same - follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.

Edwin Way Teale

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

Edwin Way Teale

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature's finest balm.

Edwin Way Teale

#23. In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Edwin Way Teale

#24. How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.

Edwin Way Teale

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Edwin Way Teale