Quotes About Nature

The thing is, we are all, in a sense, supper. Walking, talking, breathing suppers, that's what we are. Take you, for instance. YOU are about to be eaten by ME, so that makes you supper. That's obvious. But even a murderous carnivore like myself will be a supper for worms one day. We're all snatching precious moments from the peaceful jaws of time.

You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn't separate us from nature. Civilization protects us from nature.

If you are a warrior, the nature and scale of your enemies will determine the nature and scale of your actions. In this sense, it is even more important to choose your enemies more wisely than your friends.

And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.

But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again—it didn't care what I had done.

Un uomo? -risposi ridendo- Un uomo è cosa ancor più triste e più orrenda di questo mucchio di carne sfatta. Un uomo è orgolgio, crudeltà, tradimento, viltà, violenza. La carne sfatta è tristezza, pudore, paura, rimorso, speranza. Un uomo, un uomo vivo, è poca cosa, in confronto di un mucchio di carne marcia.

Finché giunsi in vista del mare. Il mare mi turbò, e mi misi a piangere. Nulla, né fiume, né pianura, né montagna, e neppure un albero, neppure una nuvola, dà l'idea della libertà quanto il mare.

Non sono degno di odiare risposi. Solo un essere puro può odiare. Quel che gli uomini chiamano odio, non è che viltà. Tutto ciò che è umano è sporco e vile. L'uomo è una cosa orrenda.

Every fall God turns water into wine in France and Chile and the Napa Valley.

Blessed are the ones who have become spiritually domesticated; the ones who have tamed the wild animal energy within them, the passions and compulsions of our lower nature.

It was a peaceful scene in the little garden. The heat was trapped there, reflected off the soft, flaky red brick of the walls, and the air was drowsy with the sound of bees, attracted by the marigolds and lavender which had been planted there to fetch them; for fruit will not be born without the bee, and the garden was given over to fruit. All

She stood to drink in the darkness and the air fallen still after a snowfall. The clouds had all blown away. Faint moonlight silvered the fresh snow. Stars shone in a black sky, like jewels on a Lady's cloak. The garden lay shrouded in silver white silence, all its roughness made smooth. Such snow, Gwyn thought, had a way of turning the world into what it was not and making it seem safe. Such snow masked the true face of the world.

Evil would be done, that was the nature of the world; that was bearable if good could also be done.

All she knew was that his smile lit up the morning as the rising sun does. For a moment, looking at his face, it was as if her ribs were empty, hollow, as if the world had stopped forever while she looked into his eyes as blue as the bellflowers that grew wild across the meadows. For a moment, just until her beating heart had returned to her chest, Birle had thought she understood everything about herself she had never understood before.

There was something that hurt him in the way the hills rose so gently from the broad, rich southern plain. Something painful in the lazy curves of the river, golden under a sinking sun, shadowed by the trees that grew along its edges.

Looked at from where she sat unsleeping, the sky seemed walled in by forest. It looked as if there was a river of sky matching the water river below.

Out here, there was salt on the wind itself that fell on your skin like rain. You could taste it. Out here the sun heated and the wind cooled, and the waves sang their constant song.

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are—like fishes not meant to swim.

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.

a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.