Quotes About Nature

Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought." We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

As to Baker, that name should be forgotten," Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. "Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…

one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things.

Beckey's fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites.

Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress.

In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us," Leopold wrote later. "When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Thrill to the names—El Dorado, Searchlight, Medicine Bow, Mesa Verde, Tombstone, Durango, Hole in the Wall, Lost Trail Pass, Nez Perce National Forest. Active names, implying that something consequential is going on: the Wind River Range, the Magic Valley, the River of No Return, the Painted Desert, Wolf Point, Paradise, Death Valley, the Crazy Mountains.

Religion is fable. Yes, a story! Poetic. Universal. And I would start in about faith, which by its very nature can never be proven, and that the foundational narratives of most religious

the mist of early morning peels away to reveal the same sight, the untended casualties of Western man's war with the rain forest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher who thought reality was best experienced through a soul in tune with the rhythms of the earth.

while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect.

Eighty-four islands in the San Juan chain are wildlife refuges; of those, humans are allowed to visit only three.

An apple that hasn't experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that's hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to bring out the acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth.

For all the horror, the land was not without its magic... After a rain- or hailstorm had rumbled through, the sky was open and embracing, the breeze only a soft whisper against the songs of meadowlarks and cooing of doves... Robin's egg blue was the color of mornings without fear. At night, you could see the stars behind the stars. Infinity was never an abstraction on the High Plains.

Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire.

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you.

I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness," Muir said

Hazel missed trees. She wanted just one sturdy elm with a branch strong enough to hold a swing. And she didn't want to live in a hole in the ground, with the snakes and tarantulas, and sleeping so near to the stink of burning cow manure.

Sometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it.

The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

Here in the corner attic of America, two hours' drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.

Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.

But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.