We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken… — Henry Beston Copy Share
“It may seem odd to contemporary readers to think of the natural year as a metaphor by which we live. As individuals, we have become far removed from direct participation in the patterns and particularities of the changing seasons. Insulated, air-conditioned, and jet-propelled, we have come to believe that we are largely independent of the earth’s basic rhythms. If we… — Henry Beston Copy Share
The creatures with whom we share the planet and whom, in our arrogance, we wrongly patronize for being lesser forms, they are not brethren,… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions… — Henry Beston Copy Share
Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
“And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
The adventure of the sun is the greatest natural drama by which we live. — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
The animal should not be measured by man. In a world older than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
If gardeners will forget a little the phrase, "watering the plants" and think of watering as a matter of "watering the earth" under the… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
We of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
