An Almanac for Moderns Quotes

“Indeed, if you think of night in the true, philosophical proportion, you must realize that it is the prevailing, the absolute thing. Light, day, burning suns and stars - all are the exceptions. They are but gleaming jewels spattered on the black cloth of darkness. Throughout the universe and eternity it is night that prevails. It is the mother of cosmos, capacious womb of light.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“The best of summer star-gazing is that it is warm enough to fling yourself upon your back and gaze up at the starts without craning the neck. In a short time the sense of intimacy with the stars is established, as it never can be when a man stands erect. You may even lose the sense of gazing up, and enjoy the exciting sensation of gazing *down* into the deep wells of space. Indeed, this is quite as correct as to say that we gaze upward at the stars. In reality there is no up or down in the universe. You are, in point of fact, a creature perpetually hung over the yawning abyss of Everywhere, suspended over it by our tiny terrestrial gravity which clamps you to the side of mother earth while you gaze down on Vega and Deneb and Arcturus and Altair whirling below you.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“The bacteria have needs, and it cannot be said too often that merely because a living creature is microscopic there is no justification for thinking that it brings us any nearer to the inanimate. The gulf between a bacterium and a carbon atom, even with all the latter's complexity, is greater than that between bacteria and man.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“Your are ignorant of life if you do not love it or some portion of it, just as it is. A shaft of light from a nearby star, a flash of the blue salt water that curls around the five upthrust rocks of the continents, a net of green leaves spread to catch the light and use it, and you, walking under the trees. You, a handful of supple earth and long white stones, with seawater running in your veins.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“The trees that live five hundred years, or five thousand, see us human mayflies grow and mate and die while they are adding a foot to their girth. Well might they ask themselves if it be not a slavish and ephemeral soft thing to be born a man.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“No other insect in the world has such a long life as this, nor a life history so disproportionate. To be sure, the summer cicada spends a year underground and another of life above it, but as there are two broods, we always have the common cicada with us. But the periodical cicada spends seventeen years as grub, and sometimes no better than seventeen days as a free creature of the sunlight and air. The fate of the insect seems miserable enough to us, but in fact the strange life history is distinctly advantageous to the creature itself. Its seventeen years underground do not represent prison to the cicada, but comfort and safety, such as a mole or an earthworm knows. It is only when this animal, which we must regard as a naturally subterranean species, takes the dangerous step of emerging into the air that it has any reason to sorrow. For, as so often happens, the moment of sexual maturity is also the moment of predestined death. Nature flings the sexes at each other and then, having no more use for them, she draws her sword and slays them.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“Every species of ant has its racial characteristics. This one seems to me to be the negro of ants, and not alone from the circumstance that he is all black, but because he is the commonest victim of slavery, and seems especially susceptible to a submissive estate. He is easily impressed by the superior organization or the menacing tactics of his raiders and drivers, and, as I know him, he is relatively lazy or at least disorganized, random, feckless and witless when free in the bush, while for his masters he will work faithfully”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An almanac for moderns