Nature Quotes

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

~ William Wordsworth

Sweet is the lore which nature brings,Our meddling intellectMisshapes the beauteous forms of things,—We murder to dissect.

~ William Wordsworth

And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Once in a while i am struckall over again... by just how blue the sky appears .. on wind-played autumn mornings, blue enoughto bruise a heart.

~ Sanober Khan

I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.

~ Louise Glück

In a pine tree,A few yards away from my window sill,A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,On a branch.I laugh, as I see him abandon himselfTo entire delight, for he knows as well as I doThat the branch will not break.

~ James Wright

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

~ Michael Pollan

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

~ Walt Whitman

When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then.So I try not to miss anything.I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moonor the slipper of its coming back.Or, a kiss.Well, yes, especially a kiss.

~ Mary Oliver

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

~ George Santayana

And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.

~ Walt Whitman

Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.

~ Robert Burns

Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun, And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run; Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air; Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

~ John Clare

The poet dreams of the mountainSometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, takingThe rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleepingUnder the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.I want to see how many stars are still in the skyThat we have smothered for years now, a century at least.I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

~ Mary Oliver

The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon.

~ Mary Oliver

On the beach, at dawn:Four small stones clearlyHugging each other.How many kinds of loveMight there be in the world,And how many formations might they makeAnd who am I everTo imagine I could knowSuch a marvelous business?When the sun brokeIt poured willingly its lightOver the stonesThat did not move, not at all,Just as, to its always generous term,It shed its light on me,My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body.

~ Mary Oliver

In your handsThe dog, the donkey, surely they know They are alive.Who would argue otherwise?But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that.What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines?Listen, all you have to do is start and There’ll be no stopping.What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks?And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take yearsBefore, finally, you hear them?

~ Mary Oliver

How heron comesIt is a negligence of the mindnot to notice how at duskheron comes to the pond andstands there in his death robes, perfectservant of the system, hungry, his eyesfull of attention, his wingspure light

~ Mary Oliver

Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine coneYou never know What opportunity Is going to travel to you, Or through you.Once a friend gave me A small pine cone- One of a few He found in the scatOf a grizzly In Utah maybe, Or Wyoming. I took it homeAnd did what I supposed He was sure I would do- I ate it, ThinkingHow it had traveled Through that rough And holy body. It was crisp and sweet.It was almost a prayer Without words. My gratitude, Tom Dancer, For this gift of the world I adore so much And want to belong to. And thank you too, great bear

~ Mary Oliver

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.

~ E.b. White

BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician

~ Robert Penn Warren

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

~ Anne Sexton

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

~ Guillaume Apollinaire

Nature is bent on new beginningand death has not a chance of winning...

~ Rosy Cole

The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.

~ Charles Williams

I’ve come down from the skylike some damned ghost, delayedtoo long…To the abandoned fieldsthe trees returned and grew.They stand and grow. Time comesTo them, time goes, the treesStand; the only placeThey go is where they are.Those wholly patient ones…They do no wrong, and theyAre beautiful. What moreCould we have thought to ask?...I stand and wait for lightto open the dark night.I stand and wait for prayerto come and find me here.” Sabbaths 2000 IX

~ Wendell Berry

Moon, that against the lintel of the westYour forehead lean until the gate be swung,Longing to leave the world and be at rest,Being worn with faring and no longer young,Do you recall at all the Carian hillWhere worn with loving, loving late you lay,Halting the sun because you lingered still,While wondering candles lit the Carian day?Ah, if indeed this memory to your mindRecall some sweet employment, pity me,That even now the dawn's dim herald see!I charge you, goddess, in the name of oneYou loved as well: endure, hold off the sun.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.

~ Ray Bradbury

Nature is another name for the miracles that are so commonplace in our lives that we take for granted and have grown used to seeing them.

~ Shalom Arush

Faith is a fertile field.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Faith is a sacred fruit.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I always thought of the stars like a handful of gems that God randomly tossed across the sky, saying, 'Here, go wherever you please.

~ Chelsea Vanderbeek

Look Below and You'll feel Rich,Look Above and You'll feel Poor

~ Vineet Raj Kapoor

It was a small church. No large cathedral towers overshadowed the purpose of the house of worship. It was a monument to faith rather than a monument to man’s triumph over nature.

~ Richard W. Kelly

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

~ Don Roff

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

~ Gaston Bachelard

The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths, wind would sweep away obtuse padding.

~ Gretel Ehrlich

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

~ James Russell Lowell

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

~ Rachel Carson