Nature Quotes

In its complexity and sensuality, nature invites exploration, direct contact, and experience. But it also inspires a sense of awe, a glimpse of what is still un-Googleable . . . life's mystery and magnitude.

~ Kim John Payne

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

~ Richard Nelson

That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.

~ Italo Calvino

Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first.

~ Antoni Gaudí

Come see the cherry trees of a water constellationand the round key of the rapid universe,come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,come before its petals are consumed.

~ Pablo Neruda

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.

~ Henry David Thoreau

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

~ Gustave Flaubert

He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to grow and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

~ Wendell Berry

Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions.

~ Lorraine Anderson

A tree without roots is just a piece of wood.

~ Marco Pierre White

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

~ Kelly Braffet

You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.'That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.

~ Marcel Proust

A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.

~ Colette

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

~ Henry David Thoreau

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

~ Virginia Woolf

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star....As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.

~ Victor Hugo

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.

~ Richard Louv

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

~ Aldo Leopold

If people think nature is their friend then they sure don't need an enemy.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Summer coming like a car from down the highway.

~ Sherman Alexie

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...

~ Margaret Atwood

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

~ Douglas Adams

as jolaha ka maram na jana, jinh jag ani pasarinhh tana;dharti akas dou gad khandaya, chand surya dou nari banaya;sahastra tar le purani puri, ajahu bine kathin hai duri;kahai kabir karm se jori, sut kusut bine bhal kori;No one could understand the secret of this weaver who, coming into existence, spread the warp as the world; He fixed the earth and the sky as the pillars, and he used the sun and the moon as two shuttles; He took thousands of stars and perfected the cloth; but even today he weaves, and the end is difficult to fathom.Kabir says that the weaver, getting good or bad yarn and connecting karmas with it, weaves beautifully.

~ Kabir

While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.

~ C.s. Lewis

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The living sinners on deadly ground.

~ Toba Beta

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

~ Ouida

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

~ Aldo Leopold

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

~ Ray Bradbury

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

~ Bill Bryson

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.

~ John Masefield

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

~ William Wordsworth

A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.

~ John Steinbeck

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.

~ Douglas Adams

English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.

~ Tomson Highway

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.

~ Richard Louv