"It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt dessert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speak of his insignificance right now. " ~ 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

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

"The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web." ~ 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

"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

"If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest." ~ 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

"It is not races but individuals that are noble and courageous or ignoble and craven or considerate or persistent or philosophical or reasonable. The race gets credit when the percentage of noble individuals is high." ~ 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