Nature Quotes

Although the gods were in the distant skies,Pythagoras drew near them with his mind;what nature had denied to human sight,he saw with his intellect, his mental eye.When he, with reason and tenacious care,had probed all things, he taught-- to those who gatheredin silence and amazement-- what he'd learnedof the beginnings of the universe,of what caused things to happen, and what istheir nature: what god is, whence come the snows,what is the origin of lightning bolts--whether it is the thundering winds or Jovethat cleave the cloudbanks-- and what is the cause of earthquakes, and what laws control the courseof stars: in sum, whatever had been hid,Pythagoras revealed.

~ Ovid

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Not for the first time, I wonder what it would feel like that, to be so beautiful that you don't even realize people are watching you, to be so confident that you don't even have to worry about being nervous or feeling self-conscious. I've spent my whole life trying to pretend I'm that way. What would it be like to have it just come naturally?

~ Lauren Barnholdt

A poet warrior realizes both the brutality and the beauty in life, and apprehends that the suffering we tragically endure is partly what makes us human. What also makes us human is the ability to love, the ability to stand in nature’s presence, and to nurture this earthly paradise to tend to our family’s needs.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

... and isn't the world a treasure in itself? A spectacle glittering every single day, without a concern if anyone's watching or not. It simply goes on, elegantly, letting nature have its way. We only need to open our eyes to witness the biggest masterpiece ever created, the ticket is already in your hand.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

~ Umberto Eco

The clouds had gathered, within the last half-hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still and colourless – met us without a smile.

~ Wilkie Collins

Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity’s claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being.

~ Camille Paglia

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

~ Mary Oliver

When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. This disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.

~ Richard Louv

Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,boulders, and caves where Kami nature spiritsminister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root, and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

~ Jalina Mhyana

Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.

~ John Berger

I say, indeed: consolation in the nonsentience of nature. For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; it is the sea gone off with the sun (Rimbaud).

~ Milan Kundera

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.

~ Camille Paglia

MORNINGTIDEThe wonderful works of morningtidebring the sight of luminous whiteness,a breathing whimsyamong wind-tossed sprigs of green.

~ Tara Estacaan

A camel brayed columns from the rondavels, new sunlight struck the savage earth.

~ Mike Bond

When I am lost in the wonder of nature, my life is vivacious.

~ Debasish Mridha

Peace within us translates to our exterior world. Our outer and inner state of peace is directly related to each other. It's simply impossible to have lasting peace around us unless we have peace within us.

~ Janice Anderson

The logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of true nature--the certainty that it's not even worth looking at. (62)

~ Richard Louv

There's nothing man can imagine that nature hasn't already created a zillion times better.

~ Stewart Stafford

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

~ Barry López

If tonight is my last, I would run towards the sea, wildly swim the tides, the jump up the hills, flounder the cliffs and take all big strides, for I am a wanderer, awed by nature's charm who would love to breathe his last in its embracing arms.

~ Arvind Parashar

Snow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.

~ Mark Haddon

Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law.

~ Richard Louv

The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.

~ Mike Bond

Long before the stars died the birds began to sing - cool rippling doves, loud cheery starlings, the long lilting trills of warblers and thrushes.

~ Mike Bond

How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I feel a new era coming in, standing on the shore, waiting for it to slowly greet me.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The month of May is the pleasant time; its face is beautiful; the blackbird sings his full song, the living wood is his holding, the cuckoos are singing and ever singing; there is a welcome before the brightness of the summer.

~ Lady Gregory

And as a sign that everything was now all right in the world, she opened her mouth a fraction, and after arranging her sticky lips better around her old teeth, smacked them and settled down into a state of blissful rest. Levin watched these last movements of hers closely. ‘I’m just the same!’ he said to himself; ‘Just the same! Never mind... All is well.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I have thought that the word America must mean different things to the people who live under its aegis. I would that for each of them it might be symbolized by one -- at least one -- memory of some aspect of unspoiled nature. America -- wide, far-reaching, insouciant -- has been the amphitheater for our civilization. I wish each of us could appreciate its vast beauty, and could see how far the elements of our civilization fall short of the sheer majesty of our America.

~ Harvey Broome

Dawn raced like fire across the savanna.

~ Mike Bond

Nature isn't hate.

~ Will Bly

Raithe enjoyed a good campfire. Something comforting about the dancing light, the smell of smoke, and the way his face and chest were hot but his backside cold. He sensed a profound meaning in this duality as well as in the enigma of flickering flames. The fire spirit spoke in spitting sparks and shifts of choking smoke, but the meaning of each remained a mystery. Everything in nature was that way. All of it spoke to him--to everyone--in a language few could understand. What secrets, what wisdom, and what horrors might he learn if only he knew what it all meant.

~ Michael J. Sullivan

My dear, dear aunt,' she rapturously cried, what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of any thing. We will know where we have gone -- we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarrelling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.

~ Jane Austen

The Elven people believe that preservation of the land and all that lives and grows upon it, plant and animal alike, is a moral responsibility. They have always held this belief foremost in their conduct as creatures of the earth. In the old world, they devoted the whole of their lives to caring for the woodlands and forests in which they lived, cultivating its various forms of vegetation, sheltering the animals that it harbored. Of course, they had little else to concern them in those days, for they were an isolated and reclusive people. All that has changed now, but they still maintain a belief in their moral responsibility for their world. Every Elf is expected to spend a portion of his life giving back to the land something of what he has taken out of it. By that I mean every Elf is expected to devote a part of his life to working with the land–to repairing damage it may have suffered through misuse or neglect, to caring for its animals and other wildlife, to caring for its trees and smaller plants where the need to do so is found.

~ Terry Brooks

Nature finds its peace in silence, forgiveness, and universal love.

~ Debasish Mridha

There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.

~ Gabriel Chevallier

Faraway a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.

~ Mike Bond