“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

It is not half so important to know as to feel.

For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to ‘know’ as to ‘feel’.

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life – we are never bored.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future… Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time.

Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.

We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.

But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.

I was the oldest of the children in my family. I had to do a lot of diaper-changing and lunch-making. I was taking my little sister to ballet, picking up my brother, sort of being a super-nanny.

I will still carry on changing all the time.

Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I’ve just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it’s not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

People always say I’m the Beatle who changed the most, but really that’s what I see life is about… you have to change.

Try to realize it’s all within yourself no one else can make you change, and to see you’re only very small and life flows on within you and without you.

I like change and I like contrast.

Education is only like good culture,–it changes the size, but not the sort.