“When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself – the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change.”

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.

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.

The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty, and symmetry, little by little, as it graduallly comes to be more and more unfolded, or displayed.

The jungle speaks to me because I know how to listen.

The perfect knowledge of events cannot be acquired without divine inspiration, since all prophetic inspiration receives its prime motivating force from God the creator, then from good fortune and nature.

Of what I call God, And fools call Nature.

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

Everything in nature is resurrection.

Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

Sure, there are oceans and seas and magnificent things – but none of them are you.