Quotes About Nature

I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature, Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire. . . . When I look into a river, I feel I could spend a whole lifetime just painting that river.

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections — not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences...

Auden turns to his guest and asks: "Do you know the frightening thing about the dandelions?" The guest, bracing himself for a riddle, confesses that he doesn't. Auden says: "The dandelions originally were sexual plants. We don't know when, but in the course of evolution they gave it up. They go on, though, with the same genes.

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

What makes a monster and what makes a man?

God is in the rain.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.

For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.

Jefferson loved order, symmetry, and balance, and there was no place on the mountaintop more orderly, symmetrical, and balanced than the garden,

in so many areas of life, Nature had made it agreeable for man to do what was virtuous.

Talent is an accident of genes — and a responsibility.

The spring is like some harlot feigning sensuality. It is not until the fall when the year gets down to its real business. I always await the Harvest Moon with enormous anticipation.

A weed is just a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.'

vegetable garden, and some

There's a reason the trees are nicknamed nuke-alyptus. Few trees have as much oil in them as eucalyptuses. They're highly flammable, so much so that during fires they sometimes explode.

Most kids grow up wanting to work with animals. There's a good reason for that. The alternative is to work with humans.

Humans are exempt from biology.

Human nature is tabula rasa (a blank slate).7

Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything's dead, but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive.

Gulls, aeroplaning above the chimney pots, were calling that he must talk to Laura about his plans. He needed no telling, for once in tune to their outlandish cries.

What is a dog? A dog is a four-legged animal that eats, sleeps, runs around, and smells when wet! It has a nose, a tail for wagging, and strange ears. These ears can hear food from half a mile away, but cannot hear 'NO' from three feet. If you throw something for a dog, he may go and get it, but he's not very likely to give it back - this is called "Fetch." Dogs also make a lots of noise, have wet noses, sticky tongues, and many disgusting habits.

We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position.

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples."