Edwin Way Teale Quotes & Sayings

For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace. — Edwin Way Teale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Edwin Way Teale

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

Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise. — Edwin Way Teale

A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives. — Edwin Way Teale

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

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

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life and the labors of life reduce themselves. — Edwin Way Teale

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. — Edwin Way Teale

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

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation. — Edwin Way Teale

If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest. — Edwin Way Teale

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

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

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

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

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. — Edwin Way Teale

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. — Edwin Way Teale

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

Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance. — Edwin Way Teale

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web. — Edwin Way Teale

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

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