Lovely Quotes (12 quotes)
Edna St Vincent Millay said:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.
So it is with Gaia. The first aeons of her life were bacterial, and only in her equivalent of late middle age did the first meta-fauna and meta-zoa appear. Not until her eighties did the first intelligent animal appear on the planet. Whatever our faults, we surely have enlightened Gaia’s seniority by letting her see herself from space as a whole planet while she was still beautiful.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.
So it is with Gaia. The first aeons of her life were bacterial, and only in her equivalent of late middle age did the first meta-fauna and meta-zoa appear. Not until her eighties did the first intelligent animal appear on the planet. Whatever our faults, we surely have enlightened Gaia’s seniority by letting her see herself from space as a whole planet while she was still beautiful.
In 'The Life History of Gaia', The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity (2006), Chap. 3, 46-47.
He should avail himself of their resources in such ways as to advance the expression of the spirit in the life of mankind. He should use them so as to afford to every human being the greatest possible opportunity for developing and expressing his distinctively human capacity as an instrument of the spirit, as a centre of sensitive and intelligent awareness of the objective universe, as a centre of love of all lovely things, and of creative action for the spirit.
…...
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
In 'Song of the Open Road', Happy Days (1933), 66.
It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.
Letter (3 Dec 1960) written to David E. Pesonen of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission. Collected in 'Coda: Wilderness Letter', The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West (1969), 153.
Lovely snowflakes! Each one falls in the appropriate place.
— Zen
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 23
Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
In Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), 330.
Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;...
When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;...
'Spring' (1877), reprinted in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Michael White (ed.) Some Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, (1945), 7.
One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.
As translated by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg in Marie Curie, Pierre Curie (1923), 188.
Pathology would remain a lovely science, even if there were no therapeutics, just as seismology is a lovely science, though no one knows how to stop earthquakes.
In A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949, 1956), 625-626.
Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
From poem, 'Evangeline' collected in The Poetical Works of H.W. Longfellow (1855), 14.
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. We are only now beginning to appreciate how strange and splendid it is, how it catches the breath, the loveliest object afloat around the sun, enclosed in its own blue bubble of atmosphere, manufacturing and breathing its own oxygen, fixing its own nitrogen from the air into its own soil, generating its own weather at the surface of its rain forests, constructing its own carapace from living parts: chalk cliffs, coral reefs, old fossils from earlier forms of life now covered by layers of new life meshed together around the globe, Troy upon Troy.
In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984), 22-23.
The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying, not, “What a lovely sermon!” but “I will do something.”
…...
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.
(1987) -- 
