Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by George Perkins Marsh

Explore popular quotes and sayings by George Perkins Marsh.

Last updated on April 15, 2025.

George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat and philologist, is considered by some to be America's first environmentalist and by recognizing the irreversible impact of man's actions on the earth, a precursor to the sustainability concept, although "conservationist" would be more accurate. The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont takes its name, in part, from Marsh. His 1864 book Man and Nature had a great impact in many parts of the world.

March 15, 1801 - July 23, 1882

Source: Wikipedia

The great question, whether man is of nature or above her.

George Perkins Marsh

All Nature is linked together by invisible bonds and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life.

George Perkins Marsh

The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.

George Perkins Marsh

Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.

George Perkins Marsh

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

George Perkins Marsh

The improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries. So much more the reason for beginning now.

George Perkins Marsh

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

George Perkins Marsh

We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth.

George Perkins Marsh

Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.

George Perkins Marsh

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are ... bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both ... at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

George Perkins Marsh

When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man.

George Perkins Marsh

Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by George Perkins Marsh

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