Nature Quotes

The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water

~ Karl Von Frisch

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

~ Freya Stark

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.

~ Michael Pollan

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

~ Michael Pollan

The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means the shores where the sea breaks its back. The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.

~ Corey Ford

If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.

~ Edward Abbey

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn't like the country and never looks at it.

~ Jules Renard

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

~ Henry David Thoreau

Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.

~ Diane Ackerman

Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the infinite. There is such a sense of security against the boundless there, even if the murmur of the wave or the silence of the sands still pursue one through tortuous corridors. The winds, despite their subtle spirits, are themselves lost in the vestibules of this labyrinth and, unable to find a way through, whistle and turn in turbulence like demented dervishes. They will not break through the walls of this den in which life still pulsates in the shadows of humanity's black sun.

~ Georges Limbour

There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever.

~ George Borrow

In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson

~ Eric Blehm

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.

~ Charles Bernheimer

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.

~ Jean Lorrain

Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life.

~ Villiers De L'isle-Adam

Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

~ Peter Redgrove

When the world has changed and the rivers run dry ad the forests grow brown will we realize that we don't run the world. We must understand that Nature is what helped us into this beautiful planet, so we must help her in return.

~ Veronica White

I thought that there could be no revolt against nature. I accepted the landscape without dreaming that, behind, there still prowled large skeletons without fur. With just one sign, I thought I was able to make them rise up outside their refuges...

~ Roger Vitrac

David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.

~ Rebecca Solnit

At the MoorWanderer in the black wind, quietly the dry reeds whisperIn the stillness of the moor. In the gray skyA flock of wild birds follows,Slanting over gloomy waters.Turmoil. In decayed hutThe spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.Crippled birches in the autumn wind.Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all aroundBy the soft gloom of grazing herds,Apparition of the night, toads plunge from brown waters.

~ Georg Trakl

Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.

~ Frederick Turner

With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

~ Alberto Caeiro

Most European nations identify themselves with eagles or lions, with some predator or creature of the air, ascendant and belligerent. I would like to visit the country which adopts the groundhog as its mascot, somewhere peaceful, some place that curls against the secrets of the earth, a little Belgium of the imagination, tables piled high with cakes, the Sunday bells ringing (not too loudly), the light falling on rolling hillocks studded with salad greens.

~ David Brendan Hopes

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.

~ John Burnham Schwartz

With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters. The highest and the lowest, the most serious and the most hilarious things are to him equally beloved, beautiful, and valuable.

~ Robert Walser

God’s favor in its fullness is that which allows strength to overcome with weakness, love to overcome hatred, God’s goodness to defeat Satan’s evil nature.

~ Sunday Adelaja

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,And not in paths of high morality,And not among the half-distinguished faces,The clouded forms of long-past history.I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:It vexes me to choose another guide:Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

~ Emily Brontë

No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe painted parchment papering our cage:Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenonThe iridule - when, beautiful and strange,In a bright sky above a mountain rangeOne opal cloudlet in an oval formReflects the rainbow of a thunderstormWhich in a distant valley has been staged -For we are most artistically caged.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The question “What is man?” is probably the most profound that can be asked by man. It has always been central to any system of philosophy or theology…. The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.

~ George Gaylord Simpson

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

~ Edward O. Wilson

Nature decrees that we do not exceed the speed of light. All other impossibilities are optional.

~ Robert Brault

The blossoms seem unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has to come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy windmills; instead there were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature's free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself.

~ Yukio Mishima

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

~ John Fowles

We need places to scream and run wild as well as places to be quiet.

~ Marty Rubin

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.

~ Ross Macdonald

Nothing is inanimate, what is the rest is our interpretation.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

The vast and beautiful world is the home we share together.

~ Bryant Mcgill

What we call life is only talk of nature.

~ Dejan Stojanovic