Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward AbbeyRead
Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong -- on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the incompatibility between technology and the natural wilderness.
Edward Abbey's quote articulates the belief that true immersion in nature requires a separation from machines and technology. He suggests that the wilderness should be experienced in its purest form, free from the noise and distractions of motors and vehicles, which tend to detract from the serenity and beauty of natural spaces.
Themes
WildernessNatureTechnologyMachinesExperienceEnjoyment
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for environmental conservation.
More from Edward Abbey
All quotes βI love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
Edward AbbeyRead
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward AbbeyRead
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Edward AbbeyRead
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.
Edward AbbeyRead
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
Edward AbbeyRead
Similar quotes
Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or 'improving' nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.
Janine BenyusRead
Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.
George SandRead
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.
Simon SchamaRead
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. ... Everything science has taught me-and continues to teach me-strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace.
Wernher Von BraunRead
Man has evolved a mutual relationship with nature on earth, but his power to change its surface has grown so tremendously that this may become a curse instead of a blessing.
Walter GropiusRead
Now this circumscribed power, which we have scarcely examined, scarcely studied, this power to whose actions we nearly always attribute an intention and a goal, this power, finally, that always does necessarily the same things in the same circumstances and nevertheless does so many and such admirable ones, is what we call 'nature' .
Jean-Baptiste LamarckRead