Take a Child Outside Week 2008

0924

Last year I ran a series of photos and quotes in celebration of Take a Child Outside Week that purely rejoiced in nature. For this year’s event, running from September 24th through the 30th, I’ve chosen quotes emphasizing the importance of nature in education and understanding ourselves:

Hawaiian Tree Fern Credit: brewbook

“Sit down before a fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”
– Thomas Henry Huxley

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
– Albert Einstein

0925

Honeycomb Credit: justus.thane

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
– Albert Einstein

“Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It’s impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.”
– Philip Jose Farmer

0926

Cactus Credit: Colin Warren

“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge. . . observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.”
– Denis Diderot

“Nature does not give to those who will not spend.”
– R. J. Baughan

0927

spiderweb Credit: Noel Zia Lee

“Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”
– Sir Francis Bacon

“We cannot command nature except by obeying her.”
– Sir Francis Bacon

0928

sunflower Helianthus annuus Credit: Esdras Calderan

“God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

0929

Shell Credit: cobalt123

“Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.”
– Isaac Asimov

“It can’t be Nature, for it is not sense.”
– Charles Churchill

“Nature never says one thing, Wisdom another.”
– Juvenal

0930

Snowflake Credit: AriCee

“Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown.”
– Humphrey Davy

“Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.”
– Jacob Brownowski