EARTH 🙝
"My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time."
-Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, 1994
❧ This entry is titled Earth, and will be a good place for quotations on the third planet from the sun, the Earth as mother, and the first of four elements of standard Greek cosmogony.
La Mettrie, Julian Offray de; System of Epicurus, paragraph 10; 1750;"If humans have not always existed as we see them today (and how can we believe they came into the world grown up as mother and father, and perfectly capable of procreating beings like themselves!), the earth must have acted as the uterus of mankind. It must have opened up its bosom to seeds of humans, already prepared so that, given certain laws, this proud animal could come forth. Why, I ask you, modern Anti-Epicureans, why should the earth, that mother and nurse of all objects, have refused to seed the animal when she has allowed the vilest, most useless, and most pernicious of plants?" transl. Charles Edwins
Shakespeare, William; Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 3; 1597;
"The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb.
And from her womb children of diverse kind
We, sucking on her natural bosom, find;
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some, and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live,
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometime, by action, dignified."