Nature Quotes

I wish I were the lily's leaf To fade upon that bosom warm, Content to wither, pale and brief, The trophy of thy paler form.

The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.

The whole journey was odd and dream-like -- the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead.

These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can." -- The Silmarllion, JRR Tolkien

How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Worms are the intestines of the earth.

Earth in beauty dressedAwaits returning spring.All true love must die,Alter at the bestInto some lesser thing.Prove that I lie.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way.

Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Wherever flowers cannot be reared, there man cannot live.

It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter.

How imperceptibly the first springing takes place!

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

I speak for the trees!

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic - have always blown on free men.

Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted. Matter is in perpetual flux. Change is always and everywhere at work; it strikes through causes and effects, and leaves nothing fixed and permanent.

Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations withthem, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

Such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them. "If one were to sting me," He thought "I should swell up as big as I am!

The earth paints a portrait of the sun at dawn with sunflowers in bloom. Unhappy with the portrait, she erases it and paints it again and again.

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.

You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

I will march on in the path of nature till my legs sink under me, and then I shall be at rest, and expire into that air which has given me my daily breath.

The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.

How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!

In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and its going.

The trees that have it in their pent-up budsTo darken nature and be summer woods.

And suddenly the moon withdraws her sickle from the lightening skies, and to her sombre cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.

Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.

Each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cöoperates, and therefore it is not in vain. But alas! each relaxing and desperation is an instinct too. To be active, well, happy, implies courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.

Tis often seenAdoption strives with nature; and choice breedsA native slip to us from foreign lands.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

Nature is accustomed to hide itself.

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frostsFall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

Happy the man whose lot it is to know The secrets of the earth. He hastens not To work his fellows hurt by unjust deeds, But with rapt admiration contemplates Immortal Nature's ageless harmony, And how and when the order came to be.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

I speak of that learning which wakes us acquainted with the boundless extent of nature, and the universe, and which even while we remain in this world, discovers to us both heaven, earth, and sea.

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

These births and deaths are changes in nature which we are mistaking for changes in us.

and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.

Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke - my poor swomee swans, why they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat.

Change is the nature of all objective things.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.