Quotes About Nature

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.

Even though laughter is still the sign of force, of the breaking out of blind and obdurate nature, it also contains the opposite element - the fact that through laughter blind nature becomes aware of itself as it is, and thereby surrenders itself to the power of destruction.

Although, I thought I knew almost everything about camping out in odd places, I still have much to learn about the art of relaxing.

Beatrice closed her eyes and dreamed whatever flowers dream. Beatrice: That's very poetic, but they don't dream anything. Flowers have no cerebral cortex.

We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true

It is precisely the envelopment of sex (and all other natural functions) with an aura of deeper meaning that makes man human and distinguishes him from the rest of animate nature. To remove that meaning, to reduce sex to biology, as all the sexual revolutionaries did in practice, is to return man to a level of primitive behavior of which we have no record in human history. All animals have sex, but only man makes love.

Self-esteem is a concept that belongs to the psychology of the Real Me. The Real Me, of course, is someone who is inherently good and admirable: Man being by nature good, inside every bad man there's a good one trying to get out, obstructed, alas, by such phenomena as low self-esteem.

We must both recognise the limitations imposed upon us by our natures and at the same time not give up striving to control ourselves. If we fail to do either, we shall succumb to ideological or instinctual beastliness—or (the curious achievement of our own age) to both.

The growth of a passion is a very peculiar thing. In highly organized intellectual and artistic types it is so often apt to begin with keen appreciation of certain qualities, modified by many, many mental reservations. The egoist, the intellectual, gives but little of himself and asks much. Nevertheless, the lover of life, male or female, finding himself or herself in sympathetic accord with such a nature, is apt to gain much.

Raw, glittering force, however, compounded of the cruel Machiavellianism of nature, if it is to be but Machiavellian, seems to exercise a profound attraction for the conventionally rooted. Your cautious citizen of average means, looking out through the eye of his dull world of seeming fact, is often the first to forgive or condone the grim butcheries of theory by which the strong rise.

I see, in evening air,How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

Nothing would give up life:Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

I study the lives on a leaf: the littleSleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,Squirmers in bogs,And bacterial creepers.

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils,And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile.

What I love is near at hand,Always, in earth and air.

When I was a lark, I sang;When I was a worm, I devoured.

Now I adore my lifeWith the Bird, the abiding Leaf,With the Fish, the questing Snail,And the Eye altering all;And I dance with William BlakeFor love, for Love's sake.

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,The lovely diminutives.I could watch! I could watch!I saw the separateness of all things!

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:The shapes a bright container can contain!

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.