Quotes About Nature

Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood.

Here is unfenced existence

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time. - The Mower

They say eyes clear with age, As dew clarifies air To sharpen evenings, As if time put an edge Round the last shape of things To show them there; The many-levelled trees, The long soft tides of grass Wrinkling away the gold Wind-ridden waves- all these, They say, come back to focus As we grow old. - Long Sight In Age

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.

Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

Viciously, then, I lock my door. The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside Ushers in evening rain. Once more Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

The earth drinks all that's left of you and asks for more.

The wasps had broke into your gallipots, And Eaten Up Your Apricots

What's bred in the bone, Admits no hope of cure.

philosophers will forever wrangle about the true nature of science as a prelude to their dream of the final knockdown argument which will silence all doubt and opposition to their own favorite utopia.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.

Space and resources preclude an exhaustive or even an extensive comparative study in this work. Instead, I will illustrate the distinctive nature of the British polity

We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.

Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

you can't hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.

Thales was the first thinker to try to account for the nature of the world without appealing to the wills and whims of anthropomorphic, Homerian gods. Rather, he sought to explain the many diverse phenomena he observed by appealing to a common, underlying principle, an idea that is still germane to modern scientific method.

When a leaf falls from a tree, when a river flows to the sea, when a bee flits from flower to flower, it happens without "action" or "doing." Nature is simply being. In the same way, human beings should simply be.