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Élisée Reclus
7 quotes
“Ethnography and ethnology...run up into anthropology as anthropology does into zoology, and zoology into biology.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ethnography and Ethnology", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), vol. viii, p. 613
“It is in no way a digression to mention the horrors of war in connection with massacres of cattle and carnivorous banquets. People's diet corresponds closely to their morality. Blood calls for blood. In this connection, if one considers the various people he has known, there will be no doubt that in general, the agreeable manners, kindness of disposition, and equanimity of the vegetarians contrasts markedly with the qualities of the inveterate meat-eaters and avid drinkers of blood.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) first seen 1901 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Vegetarianism (1901), in Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus, edited by John P. Clark and Camille Martin (Lexington Books, 2004), p. 174.
“Humanity is nature becoming conscious of herself.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) said by 1905 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let the schoolboy fresh from his prison, skeptical and world-weary, learn to follow the edges of brooks; let him contemplate the eddies, part the leaves, or lift the stones to see the water spring forth from small sources, and soon he will have become once again simple of heart, joyful, and open.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) said by 1905 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By thousands and by millions, the ‘shepherds of peoples,’ whether treacherous or full of good intentions, have armed themselves with the whip and the scepter, or, more cunningly, have repeated from century to century formulas of obedience in order to bend wills and stupefy minds. But fortunately, all these masters who sought to enslave other men through terror, ignorance, or pitiless routine have not succeeded in creating a world in their own image. They have not managed to make of nature a great mandarin’s garden, with trees tortured into the shapes of monsters and dwarfs, basins carved into geometric figures, and rockeries in the latest fashion. The earth, through the magnificence of its horizons, the freshness of its woods, the clarity of its springs, has remained the great educator, and has never ceased to call nations back to harmony and to the pursuit of liberty. A given mountain whose snows or glaciers stand in open sky above the clouds, a given great forest in which the wind howls, a given brook flowing through the meadows — these have often done more than armies for the salvation of a people.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) said by 1905 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of a stream, even one that is born and loses itself in the moss, is the history of the infinite. These glittering droplets have passed through granite, limestone, and clay; they have been snow on the cold mountain, a molecule of vapor in the clouds, white foam on the crest of the waves; the sun, in its daily course, has made them blaze with the most brilliant reflections; the pale light of the moon has faintly tinged them with iridescence; lightning has broken them into hydrogen and oxygen, then with a new shock set these primitive elements flowing again as water. All the agents of the atmosphere and of space, all the cosmic forces have worked in concert to ceaselessly transform the appearance and position of the imperceptible droplet; it too is a world, like the enormous stars that roll through the heavens, and its orbit unfolds from cycle to cycle in a movement without rest.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) said by 1905 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet our gaze is not vast enough to embrace in its entirety the circuit of the droplet, and we content ourselves with following it through its detours and falls from its first appearance in the spring to its mingling with the waters of the great river or the ocean. Feeble as we are, we try to measure nature to our own scale; each of its phenomena reduces itself, for us, to a small number of impressions we have felt. What is the brook, if not the graceful spot where we watched its water slip away beneath the shade of the aspens, where we saw its serpentine grasses sway and the rushes of its little islands tremble? The flowering bank where we loved to stretch out in the sun dreaming of freedom, the winding path that follows the current and that we walked with slow steps watching the thread of water, the angle of the rock where the smooth mass plunges as a cascade and shatters into foam, the bubbling spring — that is what, in our memory, is nearly the whole of the brook. The rest is lost in an indistinct haze.”
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) said by 1905 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source