Nature Quotes

The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.

Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time.

I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.

Sweet moonlight, shining full and clear, Why do you light my torture here? How often have you seen me toil, Burning last drops of midnight oil. On books and papers as I read, My friend, your mournful light you shed. If only I could flee this den And walk the mountain-tops again, Through moonlit meadows make my way, In mountain caves with spirits play - Released from learning's musty cell, Your healing dew would make me well!

Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight.

Nature abhors a moron.

Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves, where manners ne'er were preached.

Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.

Every natural action is graceful.

All the months are crude experiments,out of which the perfect September is made.

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here's three on's are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.

This world could not exist if it were not so simple. The ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again.

I became more and more convinced that even nature could be understood as a relatively simple mathematical structure.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

"It's so beautiful!" she said, a little breathless with her speed. "You never saw anything so beautiful! It has come! I thought it had come that other morning, but it was only coming. It is here now! It has come, the Spring!"

Because dogs and cats still live in the original state of connectedness with Being, they can help us regain it. When we do so, however, that original state deepens and turns into awareness.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants.

Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred.But here is not a question of what's sacred;Rather of what to face or run away from.I'd hate to be a runaway from nature.

Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.

The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?

Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.

When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder.

You, of course, are a rose-- But were always a rose.

For though, in nature, depth and heightAre equally held infinite:In poetry, the height we know;'Tis only infinite below.

Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.

I lean and loaf at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass.

Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

Things exalted then decay. This is going against the Way. What goes against the Way meets an early end.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

When the sun is covered by clouds, objects are less conspicuous, because there is little difference between the light and shade of the trees and the buildings being illuminated by the brightness of the atmosphere which surrounds the objects in such a way that the shadows are few, and these few fade away so that their outline is lost in haze.

If Heaven and Earth are unable to persist, how could man?

A tree there is that from its topmost boughIs half all glittering flame and half all greenAbounding foliage moistened with the dew;And half is half and yet is all the scene;And half and half consume what they renew.

The hard and stiff are death's companions. The soft and weak are life's companions.

Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.

Civilized people are taught by logic, barbarians, by necessity, communities by tradition; and the lesson inculcated even in wild beasts by nature itself. They learn that they have to defend their own bodies and persons lives from violence of any and every kind by all means within their power.

the scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

It sometimes strikes me how immensely fortunate I am that each day should take its place in my life, either reddened with the rising and setting sun, or refreshingly cool with deep, dark clouds, or blooming like a white flower in the moonlight. What untold wealth!

Swlmmlng After swallowing some water at Changsha I taste a Wuchang fish in the surf and swim across the Yangtze River that winds ten thousand li. I see the entire Chu sky. Wind batters me, waves hit me-I don't care. Better than walking lazily in the patio. Today I have a lot of time. Here on the river the Master said "Dying-dying into the past-is like a river flowing."

By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood....What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!

All flesh is one: what matter scores; Or color of the suit Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold? All is one bold achievement, All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green...

The bed of flowersLoosens amain,The beauteous snowdropsDroop o'er the plain.The crocus opensIts glowing bud,Like emeralds others,Others, like blood.With saucy gesturePrimroses flare,And roguish violets,Hidden with care;And whatsoeverThere stirs and strives,The Spring's contented,If works and thrives.

Spring-an experience in immortality.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

The worst of us is not without innocence, although buried deeply it might be.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.