Quotes About Nature

The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it

There's about as much educational benefit studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)

On aime ce qui nous a émerveillé, et on protège ce que l'on aime.

Suffering is not caused by forces outside of us but by a faulty and limited perception of life and of who we are. Our basic misperception gives rise to endless cravings for sense satisfaction. Since everything in the universe is constantly changing, nothing in Nature is capable of bringing lasting fulfillment.

Things in Nature are neutral. It is our approach that determines whether sense objects are experienced as sources of pain or pleasure.

When you have become quite wild, then perhaps one of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a Shaman.

beware, white man, of the friendly forest, of the painted desert, beware of the singing water lest you find your mother and she pounce and devour you

As Rumi reminds us, a bee and a wasp may drink from the same flower, but one produces nectar and the other a sting. We must choose the nectar.

The very nature of human organizations creates orthodoxy, and orthodoxies, in turn, give birth to reformers and mavericks, men such as Luther and Kepler.

Other things being roughly equal, that man lives most keenly who lives in closest harmony with nature. To be wholly alive a man must know storms, he must feel the ocean as his home or the air as his habitation. He must smell the things of earth, hear the sounds of living things and taste the rich abundance of the soil and sea.

The South Pacific is memorable because when you are in the islands you simply cannot ignore nature. You cannot avoid looking up at the stars, large as apples on a new tree. You cannot deafen your ear to the thunder of the surf. The bright sands, the screaming birds, and the wild winds are always with you.

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.

For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do.

The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like ten million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved.

At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.

It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great good things of sound and sight and smell.

Alaska has had to focus upon the

But in spring, of course, any place is beautiful, because in spring fires leap from your heart, and you can see things that aren't there.

Any segment of land . . . can be interesting of itself, but its greater significance must always lie in the life it sustains.

The relationship of a man to his land is never easy. It is perhaps the noblest relationship in the world, after the family, and certainly the most rewarding.