Top 35 Edwin Way Teale Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All things seem possible in May.”

— Edwin Way Teale

2. “How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!”

— Edwin Way Teale

3. “For observing nature, the best pace is a snail’s pace.”

— Edwin Way Teale

4. “Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.”

— Edwin Way Teale

5. “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

6. “The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues – self-restraint.”

— Edwin Way Teale

7. “For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature’s finest balm.”

— Edwin Way Teale

8. “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

9. “The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.”

— Edwin Way Teale

10. “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

11. “You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!”

— Edwin Way Teale

12. “Time and space – time to be alone, space to move about – these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.”

— Edwin Way Teale

13. “Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.”

— Edwin Way Teale

14. “How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.”

— Edwin Way Teale

15. “I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun.”

— Edwin Way Teale

16. “For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.”

— Edwin Way Teale

17. “It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man’s insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.”

— Edwin Way Teale

18. “To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same – follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature’s own Wilderness Road.”

— Edwin Way Teale

19. “Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.”

— Edwin Way Teale

20. “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

21. “Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.”

— Edwin Way Teale

22. “A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.”

— Edwin Way Teale

23. “In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.”

— Edwin Way Teale

24. “It is morally as bad not to care whether anything is true or not...”

— Edwin Way Teale

25. “How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.”

— Edwin Way Teale

26. “The city man, in his neon-and-mazda glare, knows nothing of nature’s midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age-old night.”

— Edwin Way Teale

27. “The “dead of winter” – – how much more dead it would be each year without the birds!”

— Edwin Way Teale

28. “To those whom the tree, the birds, the wildflowers represent only “locked-up dollars” have never known or really seen these things.”

— Edwin Way Teale

29. “Eliminate the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.”

— Edwin Way Teale

30. “As the pressure of population increasingly regiments us and crowds us closer together, an association with the wild, winged freedom of the birds will fill an ever growing need in our lives.”

— Edwin Way Teale

31. “If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.”

— Edwin Way Teale

32. “Whenever there is an organized movement to persuade people to believe or do something, whenever an effort is made to “propagate” a creed or set of opinions or convictions or to make people act as we want them to act, the means employed are called propaganda.”

— Edwin Way Teale

33. “How many beautiful trees gave their lives that today’s scandal should, without delay, reach a million readers.”

— Edwin Way Teale

34. “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

35. “The measure of an enthusiasm must be taken between interesting events. It is between bites that the lukewarm angler loses heart.”

— Edwin Way Teale

36. “Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.”

— Edwin Way Teale

37. “Here in this wild and beautiful spot amid the mountains, the dark woods, the rising mist, the new moon hanging above the silhouettes of the peaks, we waited, in spite of the night chill, until the last sunlight of the spring had ebbed from the sky.”

— Edwin Way Teale