David Byrd

“Steep curving stone stairs led to a square library on the floor above. The 4,000 books in the library were mostly collected between 1710 and 1730. ... For a moment I was tempted to ask to be locked in. If I could skim ten books a day for a year, I would be able to get a sense of most of what David Hume might have read in 1730 -- an age when it still might just have been possible to read everything.”
― Rory Stewart, The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland

“What shocks me so is the detachment with which we dispense destruction -- not just bombs, but blows to the head of the earth, to populations of insects, plants, and animals, and to one another with senseless betrayal -- and how the proposed solutions are always mechanistic, as if we could fabricate the health of the planet the way we make a new car.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“Wisdom is a rarified form of intelligence born of experience, the result of carefully testing your beliefs against reality.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“When you consider life as a whole, intelligence is a mere bristle on the hog.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods