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. Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

42. Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

43. The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

44. The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

45. Gorau Cymro tro trylew Biau'r wlad, lin Bywer Lew, Gwr meingryf, gorau mangre, A phiau'r llys; hoff yw'r lle.

46. Cnwd a gyrch mewn cnodig ar, Cnyw diwael yn cnoi daear. E fynn ei gyllell a'i fwyd A'i fwrdd dan fon ei forddwd. Gwr a'i anfodd ar grynfaen, Gwas a fling a'i goes o'i flaen.

47. The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.

48. Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light.

49. Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

50. The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

51. Clyde: Then the animals lit fires to keep us away.

52. My concern is with the rhythms of nature... I work inside out, like nature.

53. Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed.

54. If an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.

55. What more can we require? Nothing but time.

56. Dew depends not on Parliament.

57. All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

58. The dog has seldom been successful in pulling Man up to its level of sagacity, but Man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

59. A fish is like a dish that floats in the sea but is no greater than me.

60. The ripest peach is highest on the tree.

61. O'er folded blooms On swirls of musk, The beetle booms adown the glooms And bumps along the dusk.

62. I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.

63. 'I shall soon be rested,' said Fanny; 'to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.'

64. It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.

65. A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

66. There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

67. The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

68. Sibelius has an acutely developed sense of identification with nature and a preoccupation with myth that at one and the same time define his unique strength and his basic limitation. These preoccupations override his involvement in the human predicament, except in so far as it affects man's relationship with nature.

69. Jay-bird don't rob his own nes'.

70. If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

71. O'er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest.

72. Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt Der in den Zweigen wohnet.

73. Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom, Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom, Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows, And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?

74. Two souls alas! dwell in my breast.

75. In the licorice fields at Pontefract My love and I did meet And many a burdened licorice bush Was blooming round our feet; Red hair she had and golden skin, Her sulky lips were shaped for sin, Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack'd The strongest legs in Pontefract.

76. We seek to know the moving of each sphere, And the strange cause of th' ebbs and floods of Nile; But of that clock within our breasts we bear, The subtle motions we forget the while.

77. Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

78. Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

79. Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks.

80. Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.

81. The heavens rejoice in motion, why should I Abjure my so much loved variety.

82. I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

83. 'Twas when the seas were roaring With hollow blasts of wind, A damsel lay deploring, All on a rock reclined.

84. To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling.

85. For see, the dapple-grey coursers of the morn Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs, And chase it through the sky.

86. I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, The gray and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember human words, In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.

87. The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

88. Wit and wisdom are born with a man.

89. Take a straw and throw it up into the air - you may see by that which way the wind is.

90. I now leave that bed which has afforded me little rest, and eagerly seek repose in the quiet enjoyments of rural life.

91. The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the supreme being.

92. Yo quiero salir del mundo por la puerta natural: en un carro de hojas verdes a morir me han de llevar. No me pongan en lo oscuro a morir como un traidor: yo soy bueno, y como bueno morire de cara al sol.

93. I come from all places and to all places I go: I am art among the arts and mountain among mountains. I know the strange names of flowers and herbs and of fatal deceptions and magnificent griefs. In night's darkness I've seen raining down on my head pure flames, flashing rays of beauty divine.

94. Wings I saw springing from fair women's shoulders, and from beneath rubble I've seen butterflies flutter.

95. I know that when the world surrenders, pallid, to repose, the murmur of a tranquil stream through the deep silence flows.

96. All is beautiful and unceasing, all is music and reason, and all, like diamond, is carbon first, then light.

97. Peoples are made of hate and of love, and more of hate than love. But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything.

98. In truth, men speak too much of danger. Let others be terrified by the natural and healthy risks of life! We shall not be frightened! Poison sumac grows in a hard-working man's field, the serpent hisses from its hidden den, and the owl's eye shines in the belfry, but the sun goes on lighting the sky, and truth continues marching across the earth unscathed.

99. All the glory in the world fits in a kernel of corn.

100. I believe in revelation, but not in revelation which each religion claims to possess... but in the living revelation which surrounds us on every side - mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die.