The most important thing about Spaceship Earth—an instruction book didn't come with it.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
The earth was created for rich and poor in common. Nature knows no rich. She creates us all alike and alike she encloses us in the sepulchre. What more resembles one dead man than another dead man?
—Saint Ambrose
God is not a continent, like Antarctica, lying off somewhere, inert, without relation to human life till some Scott or Amundsen or Byrd finds him. God is not a mountain peak to which travelers must go and which they climb step by step. God is like the air we breathe or the earth beneath our feet. To discover God is simply to awaken to reality. It is like a plant discovering the sun and the rain that drew it from the earth or like children discovering the parents who gave them birth and love and nurture.
—Luther A. Weigle
They gave him a seashell: "So you'll learn to love the water." They opened a cage and let a bird go free: "So you'll learn to love the air." They gave him a geranium: "So you'll learn to love the earth." And they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight. "Don't ever, ever open it. So you'll learn to love mystery.
—Eduardo Galeano
The sky lovingly smiles on the earth and her children.
—Henry Morton Stanley
The earth has received the embrace of the sun and we shall see the results of that love.
—Sitting Bull
The miracle on earth are the laws of heaven.
—Jean Paul
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
—Hannah Arendt
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
—Paul Dirac
The earth is yet the place of the domicile of man and all the offspring of the first man.
—Joseph Franklin Rutherford
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
—D. H. Lawrence
Moses sees the bush as it actually is.… All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with his own two eyes directly. That glimpse of the real world—of the world as it is known to God—is not a world of isolated things but of processes in concert. God tells Moses, "Take off your shoes, because the ground where you are standing is holy ground." He is asking Moses to experience in his own body what the burning bush experiences: a living connection between heaven and earth, the life that stretches out like taffy between our father the sun and our mother the earth. If you do not believe this, take off your shoes and stand in the grass or in the sand or in the dirt.
—William Bryant Logan
Life comes from the earth and life returns to the earth.
—Zhuangzi
Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.
—Peter Benchley
I had assumed that the earth, the spirit of the earth, noticed exceptions—those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.
—Alice Walker