Quotes About Nature

Beauty is terror

Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty.

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness

They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life -- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple -- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last -- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer -- there it is.

The sun was low, burning gold through the trees, casting our shadows before us on the ground

la vita è breve. Che il destino è crudele ma forse non casuale. Che la Natura (intesa come Morte) vince sempre, ma questo non significa che dobbiamo inchinarci e prostrarci al suo cospetto. Che forse anche se non siamo sempre contenti di essere qui, è nostro compito immergerci comunque: entrarci, attraversare questa fogna, con gli occhi e il cuore ben aperti.

a drve?e je ispred na cesti cvalo bijelim praskovima delirija.

But the same "personal charm" that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved "dangerous" to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble of politics, from the need to fight for himself and his convictions. Had he come into the White House

Everything was of interest to him," marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, "people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.

They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper's Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. "In the early days," Fanny recalled, "we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith." Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare. The Roosevelts

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature; plants, animals, birds, insects reptiles, and all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony

We Chroniclers do well to be afraid when we approach those parts of our histories (our natures) that deal with evil, the depraved, the benighted. Describing, we become. We even - and I've see it and have shuddered - summon. The most innocent of poets can write of ugliness and forces he has done no more than speculate about - and bring them into his life. I tell you, I've seen it, watched it...

We're back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world's crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance.

This may be animal behaviour, I don't know, but it is certainly human behaviour, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism, and has been for thousands, probably even millions of years -- depending on where one decides to put the beginning of our history as humans, not animals.

Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making tents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover.

Greenville, South Carolina, in 1955 was the most beautiful place in the world. Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making tents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover.

The stories I made up for myself changed. In the half-sleep that preceded full sleep I began to imagine the highway that went north. No real road, this highway was shadowed by tall grass and ancient trees. Moss hung low and tiny birds with gray-blue wings darted from the road's edge to the trees.

He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.

It was good standing there on the promontory overlooking the evening sea, the fog lifting itself like gauzy veils to touch his face. There was something in it akin to flying; the sense of being lifted high above crawling earth, of being a part of the wildness of air.

Did I ever tell you,' said Lymond pausing on the afterthought, on his way to the flap, 'that that aunt of mine once hatched an egg?' He paused, deep in thought, and walked slowly to the door before turning again. His lordship of Aubigny, staring after the vanishing form of his brother, received the full splendour of Lymond's smile. 'It was a cuckoo,' said Francis Crawford prosaically, and followed Lennox out.

It is not easy for Brehons to decide concerning bees that have taken up their lodging in the trees of a noble dignitary; with respect to which it is not easy to cut the tree.

You have a tongue, have you not, which breaks backs? I have madness in many forms, but that which springs from the passions of the heart is not in my nature. That is all. We are all fashioned differently.