Edwin Way Teale Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

It is not races but individuals that are noble and courageous or ignoble and craven or considerate or persistent or philosophical or reasonable. The race gets credit when the percentage of noble individuals is high.

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

You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!

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.

A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.

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

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

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

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.

As the pressure of population increasingly regiments us and crowds us closer together, an association with the wild, winged freedom of the birds will fill an ever growing need in our lives.

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.

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

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.