Quotes
Daoism
Daodejing by Laozi (< -400)
The way that can be told is not the eternal way. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind become still. The ten thousand things arise together and we watch their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
To talk little is natural. High winds do not last all morning. Heavy rain does not last all day. Why is this? Heaven and earth! If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal, how is it possible for man?
He who knows he has enough is rich.
The way abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone.
Without desire there is tranquility.
He who is attached to things will suffer much. He who saves will suffer heavy loss. A contented man is never disappointed. He who knows when to stop does not find himself in trouble. He will stay forever safe.
Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.
Keep your mouth shut, guard the senses, and life is ever full. Open your mouth, always be busy, and life is beyond hope.
Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.
Practice non-action. Work without doing.
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Buddhism
Dhammapada by Siddhartha Gautama (< -300)
The mind quivers and shakes, hard to guard, hard to curb. The discerning straighten it out, like a fletcher straightens an arrow.
A bee takes the nectar and moves on, doing no damage to the flower's beauty and fragrance; and that's how a sage should walk in the village.
Their mind is peaceful, peaceful are their speech and deeds. Such a one is at peace, rightly freed through enlightenment.
Delightful are the wildernesses where no people delight. Those free of greed will delight there, not those who seek sensual pleasures.
Better to live a single day wise and absorbed in meditation than to live a hundred years witless and lacking immersion.
Sorrow springs from craving, fear springs from craving; one free from craving has no sorrow, let alone fear.
Defeat anger with kindness, villainy with virtue, stinginess with giving, and lies with truth.
From meditation springs wisdom, without meditation, wisdom ends.
Those that have properly undertaken constant mindfulness of the body, don't cultivate what should not be done, but always do what should be done. Mindful and aware, their defilements come to an end.
A tree grows back even when cut down, so long as its roots are healthy; suffering springs up again and again, so long as the tendency to craving is not pulled out.
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Confucianism
Analects by Confucius (< -200)
Isn't it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned?
To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
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Stoicism
Enchiridion by Epictetus (125)
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control [..] are our own actions. Things not in our control [..] are not our own actions.
Remember that following desire promises the attainment of that of which you are desirous; and aversion promises the avoiding that to which you are averse. However, he who fails to obtain the object of his desire is disappointed, and he who incurs the object of his aversion wretched.
[..] if you desire any of the things which are not in your own control, you must necessarily be disappointed; and of those which are, and which it would be laudable to desire, nothing is yet in your possession.
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.
Don't demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours.
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Transcendentalism
Nature by Emerson (1836)
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life [..] which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground [..] all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all;
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Walking by Thoreau (1851)
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. [..] What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Wildness is the preservation of the world. [..] From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
In short, all good things are wild and free.
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Environmentalism
Our National Parks by John Muir (1901)
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
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A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (1949)
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done.
Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.
Anarchism
Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (1902)
[Mutual aid] is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.
In the animal world [..] the vast majority of species live in societies, and [..] they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life.
In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions.
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Toward an Ecological Society by Murray Bookchin (1980)
Each ecosystem must be seen as a unique totality of diversified life forms in its own right. Humans, too, belong to the whole, but only as one part of the whole.
The ecological crisis of our time is testimony to the fact that the means of production developed by hierarchical society and particularly by capitalism have become too powerful to exist as means of domination.
As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.
The very concept of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.
To harmonize our relationship with the natural world presupposes the harmonization of the social world.
Utopia, which was once a mere dream in the preindustrial world, increasingly became a possibility with the development of modern technology.
A technologically sophisticated utopia [..] could live in reverence for nature and bring its consciousness to the service of life.
Utopia redeems the future. It recovers it for the generations to come and restores it to them as a future which they can creatively form and thoroughly emancipate.
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