Rachel Carson Quotes

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

“Drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see.”

“For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind.

One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself: What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

“I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

Once the emotions have been aroused – a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response.

Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.”

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. ”

“It is not half so important to know as to feel.”

“Many children delight in the small and inconspicuous.”

“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

“There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring.

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”