Selected nature quotes

1. When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.

2. Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, - Outward bound.

3. I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

4. I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

5. I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

6. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

7. The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.

8. It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

9. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough.

10. There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

11. The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks, and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair.

12. God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

13. The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

14. Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

15. We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

16. We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

17. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

18. God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

19. Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

20. The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.

21. Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

22. While the hollow oak our palace is, Our heritage the sea.

23. Gather the flowers, but spare the buds.

24. Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide.

25. Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.

26. You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

27. Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.

28. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

29. So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

30. Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

31. In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

32. Concerning the generation of animals akin to them, as hornets and wasps, the facts in all cases are similar to a certain extent, but are devoid of the extraordinary features which characterize bees; this we should expect, for they have nothing divine about them as the bees have.

33. Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.

34. If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way.

35. The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

36. The trouble is that sex is a force of nature, and reason is not.

37. At what point in my struggle with nature will nature finally give up?

38. As soon as I got out there I felt a strange relationship with the pitcher's mound. It was as if I'd been born out there. Pitching just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Striking out batters was easy.

39. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

40. True as the needle to the pole, Or as the dial to the sun.

41. Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term 'Art,' I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

42. Still falls the Rain - Dark as the world of man, black as our loss - Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.

43. Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light - The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe. . . the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.

44. There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature, and of nations.

45. My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.

46. When I write 'paradise' I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

47. Yes. I remember Adlestrop - The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

48. We are the voices of the wandering wind, Which moan for rest and rest can never find; Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life, A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife.

49. Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.

50. Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished.

51. God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.

52. The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife.

53. So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

54. We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia.... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

55. On the mountains there is freedom! The world is perfect everywhere, Save where man comes with his torment.

56. I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, - through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

57. Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

58. Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

59. Nothing leads to good that is not natural.

60. If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in one hundred years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt... It is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.

61. Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

62. That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

63. Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

64. The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

65. The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator's hand.

66. There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?

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

68. Just remember, it's the birds that's supposed to suffer, not the hunter.

69. I walked beside the evening sea And dreamed a dream that could not be; The waves that plunged along the shore Said only: 'Dreamer, dream no more!'

70. If naturalists go to heaven [about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt], I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.

71. Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorled ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

72. Nothing is so beautiful as Spring- When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.

73. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

74. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

75. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are - of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.

76. There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

77. When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death. for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

78. Divinity reveals herself in all things... everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings, and from the smallest beings, according to their capacity. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.

79. The one infinite is perfect, in simplicity, of itself, absolutely, nor can aught be greater or better, This is the one Whole, God, universal Nature, occupying all space, of whom naught but infinity can give the perfect image or semblance.

80. For nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none... And while the outer face of things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.

81. She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification -- for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

82. 'We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.'

83. But high up on the mountain When the wind is hitting it If you're watching very closely The rock slips a little bit...

84. 'Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.'

85. [I wouldn't mind turning into] a vermilion goldfish.

86. All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

87. Nature is wont to hide herself.

88. No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

89. It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa.

90. About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America.

91. The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.

92. On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.

93. Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

94. The snow had begun in the gloaming, And busily all the night Had been heaping field and highway With a silence deep and white.

95. I've always liked Saturn. But I also have some sympathy for Pluto because I heard it's been downgraded from a planet, and I think it should remain a planet. Once you've given something planetary status it's kind of mean to take it away.

96. I saw the lightning's gleaming rod Reach forth and write upon the sky The awful autograph of God.

97. 'The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.'

98. 'To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.'

99. Summer - summer - summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!

100. In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out, and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.