Earth, (probably) the only planet humankind has ever known in the vast, dark expanse of the universe, is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. We humans, on the other hand, are far younger, with our first Homo sapiens ancestors appearing in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago. That leaves a wide berth of more than 4.4 billion years between the inception of our “pale blue dot” and the start of human existence as we know it.
Our beloved planet, which astronomer Carl Sagan famously called “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” is diverse, powerful, and exciting beyond even experts’ wildest imaginations. The sheer magnitude of Mother Earth is too gargantuan for our minds to fully comprehend. Nonetheless, humans throughout history have attempted to put words to our unique terrestrial experience and the immense beauty that surrounds us.
Here are 13 of our favorite quotes about Earth and nature by humans including astrophysicists, environmentalists, and poets that leave us full of awe and reverence.
Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them … Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them. We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside.Suzy Kassem
Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood … Her mud and lava is a message from the past. Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?Jeanette Winterson
I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”Lewis Carroll
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, / But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. / For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, / And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love.Kahlil Gibran
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity … and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.William Blake
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each … Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.Henry David Thoreau
In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportsmen the cover for game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not at all follow that we should see them.John Lubbock
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.Carl Sagan
[We may have] the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.David Attenborough
I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me / Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and doubled stretch of water.Robinson Jeffers
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone.Edward Abbey
Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that’s no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it’s to dust that we go.Tom Robbins
The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows … In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness.John O’Donohue
Featured image credit: Photoongraphy/ Shutterstock
