Edwin Way Teale Quotes

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.

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

If I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell--among all the delights of the open world--on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and--most spiritual and moving of sights--the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky.

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.

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

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

All things seem possible in May.

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

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

It is morally as bad not to care whether anything is true or not.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north.

Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants...have often been stay-at-home naturalists...concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area.

How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!

The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues--self-restraint. Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream? Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower? Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same. My act will be multiplied endlessly. To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty, everyone has to deny himself proportionately. Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds.

Looking at life through the eyes of a Daddy long legs: Imagine walking on legs so long you could cover a mile in fifty strides! Imagine looking to either side through eyes set not in your head but in a... hump in your back! Imagine your knees, when you walked, working a dozen feet or more above your head.

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

I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun.

The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues - self-restraint.

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.