Nature Quotes

The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?I said nothing.What colour's a blackbird? she said.BlackTypical!

~ David Almond

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

~ Michel Foucault

When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west -- that cloud field of the sky -- to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.

~ Hal Borland

Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable.

~ Sherman Alexie

Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Life (like love) is forgiving and hopeful and, like a bold flower pushing out from the narrow crevice in a rock, will take any gap we allow. However small or large.

~ Sally Andrew

In the end, having no compass for his desires, he yielded to his nature.

~ K.j. Bishop

Once when I looked up, I happened to see a sea eagle poised on magisterial wings above the knurled summit of the mountain behind my tent. It was a scene of peerless tranquility, tossed out in Nature's devil-may-care way, which says: Just open your eyes, my friend, and I'll astonish you every minute of your life.

~ Lawrence Millman

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

~ Diane Ackerman

The very air they breathed was almost a juice.

~ Rebecca Wells

I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman's relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance... When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature, of which we are inescapably a part.

~ Henry Beston

I send my friends e-mail messages about the progress of my garden, especially of my roses. It left them with the impression, I think, that I was concerned with nothing else. I felt no urgency in correcting that notion. People obsessed with their gardens have probably caused the least suffering in the world of any category of men.

~ David Brendan Hopes

But people are not butterflies, right.People are, well, more important than butterflies.We have opposable thumbs, hello.You can't possibly compare the sanctity of a human's life with that of a butterfly. In our culture you can and, indeed, must quantify sanctity, and butterflies have less than people.

~ Inga Muscio

The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings.

~ W.g. Sebald

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

The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.

~ Thomas Hobbes

When people tell me they can’t afford to join a gym, I tell them to go outside; planet Earth is a gym and we’re already members. Run, climb, sweat, and enjoy all of the natural wonder that is available to you.

~ Steve Maraboli

He was the owner of the moonlight on the ground, he fell in love with the most beautiful of the trees, he made wreaths of leaves and strung them around his neck.

~ Tove Jansson

I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

~ J.a. Baker

Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight.

~ The Beatles

Colors shift like smoke within the branch beneath our feet. Sprites jump from leaf to leaf, leaving sprinklings of glittery dust in the air behind them. Droplets of water are strung like pearls from the silver strands of a spider’s web. Bluebottle glow-bugs stick to the leaves and branches, lighting up the night with their blue-green bodies. And high above us, clouds are draped like sashes of color across the sky. Amethyst, azure, jade.

~ Rachel Morgan

The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures.

~ Eric Chaisson

My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.

~ Henry Beston

Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours -- to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever idea there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you.

~ Savitri Devi

And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.

~ Jack Kerouac

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

~ Vernor Vinge

The river of my village doesn’t make you think about anything.When you’re at its bank you’re only at its bank.

~ Alberto Caeiro

Nature is not tailored to man. It exists for itself.

~ John E. Smelcer

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

~ John Muir

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

~ Edward Abbey

I’ve often thought of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Nature is not merely created by God; nature is God. Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness, experience sacredness with his entire body, breathe sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in sacredness, touch the living branch and feel the sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty of sacredness

~ Richard Nelson

I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right.

~ Alan Lee

Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?

~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

If the private life of the sea could ever be transposed onto paper, it would talk not about rivers or rain or glaciers or of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen, but of the millions of encounters its waters have shared with creatures of another nature.

~ Federico Chini

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

~ Gretel Ehrlich

Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The sense of respiration is an example of our natural sense relationship with the atmospheric matrix. Remember, respiration means to re-spire, to re-spirit ourselves by breathing. It, too, is a consensus of many senses. We may always bring the natural relationships of our senses and the matrix into consciousness by becoming aware of our tensions and relaxations while breathing. The respiration process is guided by our natural attraction to connect with fresh air and by our attraction to nurture nature by feeding it carbon dioxide and water, the foods for Earth that we grow within us during respiration. When we hold our breath, our story to do so makes our senses feel the suffocation discomfort of being separated from Earth's atmosphere. It draws our attention to follow our attraction to air, so we inspire and gain comfort. Then the attraction to feed Earth comes into play so we exhale food for it to eat and we again gain comfort. This process feels good, it is inspiring. Together, we and Earth conspire (breathe together) so that neither of us will expire. The vital nature of this process is brought to consciousness when we recognize that the word for air, spire, also means spirit and that psyche is another name for air/spirit/soul.

~ Michael J. Cohen