Nature
- All the works of Nature are Miracles, and nothing makes them appear otherwise but our familiarity with them.--Samuel Butler
- The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual, slow beat; always inching its way forward, change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.--John O'Donohue (Benedictus)
- Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.--John Muir
- Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.--Ellis Peters
- Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend time wondering why nature is the way it is.--Carl Sagan (Introduction to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking)
- A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.--John Muir
- The four seasons of nature are a helpful way to recognize that there are profound changes that can come with the seasons of our lives. Recognizing the seasons, honors the changes in our lives. Honoring the seasons, honors the truth that some changes are welcome, and some are not. But to live, is to know change.--Lynn Holt ("A New Season")
- Gardening grows the spirit.--Barbara Mock
- He who plants a tree is a servant of God.--Louis L'Amour (Big Man)
- I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.--J. R. R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)
- The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.--Ed Abbey
- If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked, out with little wildflowers.--Saint Therese of Lisieux
- If I have learned nothing else in all these months in the woods, I have thoroughly learned to keep hands off the processes of nature.-Laura Lee Davidson (A Winter of Content)
- If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things in nature have a message you understand, Rejoice, for your soul is alive.--Eleanora Duse
- If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would we believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.--Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Nature")
- In nature we find silence – the trees, flowers, and grass grow in silence. The stars, the moon, and the sun move in silence. Silence of the heart is necessary so you can hear God everywhere—in the closing of a door, in the person who needs you, in the birds that sing, in the flowers, in the animals.-–Mother Teresa
- In spring, nature is like a thrifty housewife ... taking up the white carpets and putting down the green ones.--Mary Baker Eddy (Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896)
- In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.--Margaret Atwood
- In this fast paced, plastic, microchip culture, dominated by internet, T.V. and satellite dishes, we rush from place to place and often fail to find our roots in the created order. Cars speed by forests, deserts, mountains and streams, missing the "statement" these wild areas are making to us about the origins and purpose of our life. We hurry past the wild flowers, the mountains, the deer. We carry the pressures and stresses of modern life along with us.--Ewart, J. Lloyd (Inspirational Images)
- Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit - to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.--Alan Watts (Psychedelics and Religious Experience)
- It is a pleasure to a real lover of Nature to give winter all the glory he can, for summer will make its own way, and speak its own praises.--Dorothy Wordsworth (The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. v. 1)
- It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.--Jimmy Carter
- The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.--Euclid (in Mathematical Journey by Stanley Gudder)
- Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children...let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money...and once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.--Ansel Adams
- Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
- Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.--Jimmy Carter (An Outdoor Journal)
- Look on this beautiful world, and read the truth in her fair page.--William Cullen Bryant
- Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.--Jacob Brownowski
- The miracles of nature do not seem miracles because they are so common. If no one had ever seen a flower, even a dandelion would be the most startling event in the world.--Anonymous
- The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thought and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains.--John Muir
- The natural world is dynamic. From the expanding universe to the hair on a baby's head, nothing is the same from now to the next moment.--Helen Hoover ("The Waiting Hills" in The Long-Shadowed Forest)
- Nature always takes her time. Great oaks don't become great overnight. They also lose a lot of leaves, branches and bark in the process of becoming great.--Andrew Matthews
- Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)
- Nature is a kind mother. She couldn't well afford to make us perfect, so she made us blind to our failings.--Josh Billings
- Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.--John Muir
- Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.--John Ruskin
- Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.--Henry David Thoreau (Journal January 14, 1861)
- Nature often holds up a mirror so we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, renewal, and transformation in our lives.--Mary Ann Brussat
- Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.--Napoleon Hill
- Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.--Mary Webb (The Spring of Joy)
- [A person’s] utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.--David Hume
- The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.--John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
- Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.--Thomas H. Huxley
- Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.--David Wagoner ("Lost")
- The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still slowly ripen a fruit tree, as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.--Galileo Galilei.
- Then let me go to nature as I came from nature to the great cycles of creativity that I have dimly, so dimly, understood...--Mary Jean Irion ("Then Let Me Go to Nature")
- There are for starters, grandeur and silence, pure water and clean air. There is also the gift of distance … the chance to stand away from relationships and daily ritual … and the gift of energy. Wilderness infuses us with its own special brand of energy.--Lynn Thomas
- 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.--Lord Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage)
- There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.--Linda Hogan
- There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.--Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
- They are much to be pitied who have not been… given a taste for nature early in life.--Jane Austin (Mansfield Park)
- To grow up in intimate association with nature - animal and vegetable - is an irreplaceable form of wealth and culture.--Miles Franklin (Childhood at Brindabella)
- The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.--William Blake
- Twilight: A time of pause when nature changes her guard. All living things would fade and die from too much light or too much dark, if twilight were not.--Howard Thurman
- The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.--Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)
- The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.--David Suzuki
- We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.--Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
- We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understanding and our hearts.--William Hazlitt
- We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.--Werner Heisenberg
- What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.--Isaac Bashevis Singer
- What we call man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.--C. S. Lewis
- Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.--Enrico Fermi
- Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.--Wendell Berry
- The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.--George Sand
- You cannot hold back a good laugh any more than you can the tide. Both are forces of nature.--William Rotsler
- You will find something far greater in the woods than you will find in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.--St. Bernard of Clairvaux
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This page last updated April 1, 2017.