A place for inspirational quotes, poems, art and photos. An emphasis on the positive. Contributions welcome.
Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
Michel de Montaigne
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
Chief Seattle, 1855
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
Henry David Thoreau, “Chesuncook,” The Maine Woods, 1848
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.
John Sawhill, former president of The Nature Conservancy
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
Paul Samuelson, economist
Only when I saw the Earth from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind’s most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.
Sigmund Jahn, German cosmonaut
Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.
Walt Whitman
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
John Muir
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Dr. Seuss, from The Lorax
Verdurous 
”We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.’ Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell & others. ‘The Pugwash Manifesto’.
Very long but beautiful Thoreau passage and very rarely quoted:
“When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here – the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., ete., – I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. …I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possses and have read, that my anscestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod has come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.” Henry David Thoreau
A great metaphor that Thoreau gives us. Thanks Dan.
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Kenneth Boulding.
“The positive task of the philosopher is to fecundate his analytical skills with dreams, and to discipline his dreams with analysis. … There are no rules and regulations for being reasonable, and certainly no rules and regulations for dreaming reasonable dreams. In philosophy, as perhaps in everything else, one communicates best his deepest dreams by enacting them.
Stanley Rosen, The Limits of Analysis
John,
Thanks for adding to this page. Particularly fond of the philosophical quote.
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