For a mid-week boost, we’ve decided to pair some of our favorite nature quotes with photos from our amazing trips. From our polar bear tours to the penguins of Antarctica and everywhere between, enjoy some of the best:

Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius. ~Edward O. Wilson

Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. ~Albert Einstein

Grizzly Bear Charge

Some of nature’s most exquisite handiwork is on a miniature scale, as anyone knows who has applied a magnifying glass to a snowflake. ~Rachel Carson

Monarch Butterfly Migration

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals… In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. ~Henry Beston

King lion

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. ~Frank Lloyd Wright

Galapagos Tortoise

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. ~Henry David Thoreau

Harp Seal

If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. ~St. Francis of Assisi

Yellowstone Wolf Trio

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures. ~His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Baby Gorilla