9 Quotes by Donald C. Peattie

Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury – you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.

What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.

A word, a smile, and the stranger at your elbow may become an interesting friend. All through life we deny ourselves stimulating fellowship because we are too proud or too afraid to unbend.

Time is not money; time is an opportunity to live before you die. So a man who walks, and lives and sees and thinks as he walks, has lengthened his life.

The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.

The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.

No matter how widely you have travelled, you haven’t seen the world if you have failed to look into the human hearts that inhabit it.

Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.

All the great naturalists have been habitual walkers, for no laboratory, no book, car, train or plane takes the place of honest footwork for this calling, be it amateur’s or professional’s.