Quotes About Nature

Nature's perfectly cruel in the most just ways

One can't get upset at the dying fields when he is constantly warring with the rain clouds

Trees make me believe that we can also renew and reshape our lives, no matter what we face life.

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product it's an understanding of human nature.

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

As modes of being -- for all things are composites of a nature with an "act of being," actus essendi -- things add to being not by bringing to it something extrinsic but, on the contrary, by bringing out of it its intrinsic riches in some determinate way.

How brave a ladybug must be! Each drop of rain is big as she. Can you imagine what you'd do, If raindrops fell as big as you?

the thick stream of air hauled toward the summits first the great horses of noise reared against the sky then sluggishly the great limp octopus of smoke a derisory spitter injecting the night with the insolent perfume of a citronella lamp and a wind swept down on the islands to be riddled by the suspect violence of the locusts . . .

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

your face like a village asleep at the bottom of a lake which is reborn to daylight from the grass and from the year germinates

Vampire flowers, honey, soul poison.

ma chère penchons sur les filons géologiques (my dear let us lean on geographical veins)

the forest remembers that the last word can only be the flaming cry of the bird of ruins in the bowl of the storm

There are a whole lot of things whose names I do not know and I'd like to tell you about them in the sky your hair solemnly draws away kinds of rain one no longer sees nuts Saint Elmo's fire sun lames whispered nights cathedrals too which are the carcasses of large gnawed horses spat by the sea from far away but still worshiped by people a whole lot of forgotten things a whole lot of dreamed things

It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.

Summer-induced stupidity. That was the diagnosis, I decided as I made my way up the dirt path in the pouring rain.

I watched the land for as long as I could, until it disappeared behind its shawl of mist, and until I had it fixed in my mind - unchanged, mysterious and beautiful

There is a time for stillness, but who hasn't also wanted to scream with delight at being outdoors? To simply announce themselves and say, I'm here, I exist?

But I think it's the quiet way you settle into the crook of a tree trunk, the still and slowdown of your heart in a world that wants us to be quick and to move onto the next thing.

How can one even imagine us getting back to a place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day? A place where "a bird" navigating a dewy meadow is transformed into something more specific, something we can hold onto by feeling its name on our tongues: brown thrasher. Or that "big tree": catalpa. Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.

There's a spot over Lake Superior where migrating butterflies veer sharply. No one understood why they made such a quick turn at that specific place until a geologist finally made the connection: a mountain rose out of the water in that exact location thousands of years ago. These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they've never seen,

Sometimes it is possible to still embrace the wildness of home, even if the lone window in your room only blooms snow and more snow.

I'd rather share sunrise with him and loon call over the lake with him, the slap of shoreline threaded through screen windows with him—my heart slamming in my chest, against my shirt—a kind of kindling you'd never be able to light on your own.

Looking back back at the one and only time I've gone swimming with a whale shark, I realize I was simply unprepared to submit myself so completely to nature. Or rather, humans' interpretation and preservation of nature, by adding 1.8 million pounds of sea salt to a giant tank of water so all these creatures could live and swim together. For science. For entertainment. For spectacle. Perhaps for a little of all three.