28 Quotes by Bernd Heinrich

In order to forge alliances, we first need worthy adversaries. Without adversaries, no alliances are necessary.

There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dreams, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place by E. B. White.

Consciousness is not a thing. It is a continuum without boundaries. We can most readily see its presence or absence in the extremes. In mussels, and in men. Is one of those extremes for birds found in ravens? Is it of sufficient magnitude for us to detect with our feeble detectors, our minds?

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of less worth?

Around a bend, a pair of wood ducks makes squeaking calls and rises with splashing and then whistling wings. You do not see the male’s brilliant garb of red, purple, green, and blue. But you know you are hearing the jewels of the marsh.

There is beauty not only in that things work, but how they work.

With ravens, the line between interpretation and fact is commonly a thin one, but as Mark Pavelka, who studied ravens for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said, “With other animals you can usually throw out 90 percent of the stories you hear about them as exaggerations. With ravens, it’s the opposite. No matter how strange or amazing the story, chances are pretty good that at least some raven somewhere actually did that.” That is because ravens are individuals. Ants aren’t.

We need to take exercise, and vitamins, when our normal life styles, and diet, are at odds with the ancestral conditions that shaped us.

The newspaper, delivered daily to my mailbox, is a convenience I need to help start my fire in the morning. Not wanting to waste anything, I sometimes even read it.