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Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge.

— Rachel Carson Speech at Scripps College (1962)

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Poetry

More quotes by Rachel Carson

In our modern world nothing may be taken for granted-not even the spring songs that herald the return of the birds.

Vanishing Americans (1959)

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future.

Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961)

Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.

As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life.

Speech (1954)

The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.

Silent Spring (1962)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Rachel Carson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.