EDEN ON E   RTH

There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.

- Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

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The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

- Henry Miller

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How do I sing this so I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed.

- Joy Harjo

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Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

- Ray Bradbury

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In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

- Carl Sagan

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Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

- Mary Oliver

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And then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

- Vincent Van Gogh

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Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

- Henry David Thoreau 

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It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

- Sir David Attenborough

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Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. 

- Mary Oliver

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“Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.”

- L.M. Montgomerey, Anne of Green Gables

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Nothing is art if it does not come from nature.

- Antoni Gaudi

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We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

- John Muir

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I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.

- John Muir

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Going to the mountains is going home.

- John Muir

 

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.  

- EB White

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I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.

- Björk

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Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy-- your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.  

- Annie Leibovitz

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An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

- Henry David Thoreau

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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

- Terence McKenna

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There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more. -- Lord Byron

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I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

- Jack Kerouac

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 “I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been seen although they may have been looked at. We’ll make friends with the wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts.”

- L.M. Montgomerey, Anne of Green Gables

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Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

- Carl Sagan

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A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

- Carl Sagan

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Curiousity is the essence of our existence.

- Gene Cernan

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And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire-- clearly I’m not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value.

- Mary Oliver

 

There is only one question: how to love this world.

- Mary Oliver

 

So much universe, and so little time.

 - Terry Pratchett

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Having joy and seeing wonder is an act of resistance.

- Ami Vitale

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“Can is not the same as must.”

“But if you must and you can, then there's no excuse.”

- Philip Pullman

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Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

- Henri Poincaré

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The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.

- Edward Abbey

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I can talk about my father in ordinary conversation without feeling more than the slightest pang of loss. But if I permit myself to remember him closely—his sense of humor, say, or his passionate egalitarianism—the facade crumbles and I want to weep because he is gone. There is no question that language can almost free us of feeling. Perhaps that is one of its functions—to let us consider the world without in the process becoming entirely overwhelmed by feeling. If so, then the invention of language is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.

- Carl Sagan

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I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see instantly I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast they never see the mechanics of understanding.

- Carl Sagan

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Anyway, if you stop tellin’ people it’s all sorted out afer they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive. 

- Terry Pratchett

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There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

- Terry Pratchett

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When we avoid difficult conversations we trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.

- Peter Bromberg

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There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

- Terry Pratchett