To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.

Rachel Carson
About This Quote

The quote above is a quote from the novel "Mortal Engines," and refers to the fact that these people have tried to conquer nature and yet failed. They seem to be living in a state of denial, unwilling to accept the truth. They have tried so many different ways of controlling nature and have failed. When they finally concede this fact, it seems like the final irony. To deny the truth and fail to achieve your goal is an ultimate humiliation.

Source: Silent Spring

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  4. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more - George Gordon Byron
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More Quotes By Rachel Carson
  1. It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life...
  2. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
  3. The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it...
  4. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
  5. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
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