Quotes About Nature

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Of all exercises walking is the best.

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish piecemeal.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.

The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best.

To you I speak with much hesitation about suffering. . . . But there is an introduction to suffering which comes with the birthpains of Love. And in such suffering one finds for the first time how deep and profound is the nature and meaning of life. And in such suffering one sees, as if one's eye were newly opened upon a blinding light, . . . And there too is suffering, but there, above all, is peace and victory.

Everyone can identify with a fragrant garden, with beauty of sunset, with the quiet of nature, with a warm and cozy cottage.

People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living, the beauty of nature, quiet, tranquillity, peace, joy, hope. They beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast.

I think that many non-Natives find it hard to understand why Native people are willing to fight so hard to protect their land. In the case of Gwaii Haanas, all you have to do is stand at the ocean's edge with the cedars at your back and the sky on your shoulders, and you will know.

The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn't have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.

We all have romantic nature of one kind or another buried somewhere in our hearts.

No, she is wilder, and more hard withal Than beast, or bird, or tree, or stony wall.

there's a common trick nature plays on its would-be investigators: resemblance, the human urge to map the unknown onto the already known, can be a snare. Just because something looks like something else doesn't mean that the backstory for both must be the same. Rocks scattered across the sky may appear to be a rubble field left behind by an explosion…but unless you stop to think how else you might get there, you rely on assumptions not in evidence.

The enterprise of making sense of the material world turns on a key question: what happens when something observed in nature doesn't fit within the established framework of existing human knowledge?

The multicolored leaves were softly glowing against the black sky, creating an untimely nocturnal rainbow which scattered its spectral tints everywhere and dyed the night with a harvest of hues: peach gold and pumpkin orange, honey yellow and winy amber, apple red and plum violet. Luminous within their leafy shapes, the colors cast themselves across the darkness and were splattered upon our streets and our fields and our faces. Everything was resplendent with the pyrotechnics of a new autumn.

We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

Our common preference as a species is for difference rather than unity. (Vive la différence. Vive la guerre.) Nobody designed us to be this way—it just happens to be how we blundered into the nightmare of being. Life preys on life, per Schopenhauer

There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.

For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.

Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?