Quotes About Nature

The appearance of a disease is swift as an arrow; its disappearance slow, like a thread.

My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass.

...the ear of the heart hears bluebirds...

Love blooms petals, thorns, and nettles.

The spring breathes in the breezes, The woods with wood-notes ring, And all the budding hedgerows Are fragrant of the spring. In secret, silent places The live green things upstart; Ice-bound, ice-crown'd dwells winter For ever in my heart.

Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem...

History is the action and reaction of these two,— Nature and Thought;— two boys pushing each other on the curb-stone of the pavement.

Hope whispers from every hyacinth-bell...

The birds of hope are everywhere — listen to them sing.

...and God forbid that I should go to any Heaven in which there are no horses...

Horses — if God made any creature more beautiful, He kept it for himself.

A horse is poetry in motion.

It is difficult to be good-natured in a hot day. Intense heat destroys even the temper of steel, and why not that of flesh and blood?

Think of raking leaves as Mother Nature's way of getting you in shape for shoveling snow.

For my part, I am not so sure at bottom that man is, as he says, the king of nature; he is far more its devastating tyrant. I believe he has many things to learn from animal societies, older than his own and of infinite variety.

There's a tension to being human... People are the only animals that die in childbirth... on a regular basis, I mean. It's really common for our species. Even now, with all our modern medicine... It's because of our brains... It makes you what you are, but it doesn't fit easily through a tiny birth canal.

Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature, and among them man is but one — perhaps the most miserable of all, because he is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?"

I felt myself like a foolish bird, a bird born in a cage without power to attain freedom... I walked along the fields, by the neat iron railing with which they were enclosed. All about me was visible the care of man. Nature herself seemed under the power of the formal influence, and flourished with rigidity and decorum. Nothing was left wild. The trees were lopped into proper shape, cut down here where their presence seemed inelegant and planted there to complete the symmetry of a group.

Nature is now. Humans are a tangled mess of past, present, and future.

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled...

I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.

Humans have an odd ecology.

Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human.

He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.