Quotes About Nature

There is the sudden sound of pennants stirring on their staffs as the wind comes up.

I did not truly know M. Masteen," said the priest. "We were not of the same faith. But we were of the same profession; Voice of the Tree Masteen spent much of his life doing what he understood to be God's work, pursuing God's will in the writings of the Muir and the beauties of nature. His was the true faith—tested by difficulties, tempered by obedience, and, in the end, sealed by sacrifice." Dur

Even in the still shadowed places, glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old Earth and radiant gossamers from Maui-Covenant blinked and coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.

Womangrove root and firefern lined the banks, and each branch and twisting

Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse—their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity—but

Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic.

Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies and makes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.

As G. K. Chesteron once wrote: "You can free things from alien or accidental laws of their own nature…. Do not go about…encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.

We eagles sing no soothing songs. Our throats can only whistle. Instead, we hunt them down, take them from others.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin. It was to be a writer, and I wanted in.

flower points to a bird, bird cries like a closed eye I see your dreams. Things like my heart I never see, but see hearts bird-shaped, flower-shaped, the radiant weightless shadow my heart casts—upward, to ground...

In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me, upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use; and that, whatever we may heap up to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more. 

em un mot la nature et l'experience m'appirent,apres mure reflexion,que toutes les bonnes choses de l'univers ne sont bonnes pour nous que suivont l'usage que nous en faisons,et qu'on n'en jouit qu'autant qu'on s'en sert ou qu'on les amasse pour les donner aux autres,et pas plus

Sure we are all made by some secret Power, who formed the earth and sea, the air and sky. 

I shot at a great bird which I saw sitting upon a tree on the side of a great wood.

for that gratitude was no inherent virtue in the nature of man, nor did men always square their dealings by the obligations they had received so much as they did by the advantages they expected.

A man that coveted a retreat in this world might as agreeably spend his time... in Dorchester as in any town I know in England.

Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.

Todo padre sabe que, desde el momento de su nacimiento, un niño es tranquilo y plácido o, en cambio, irritable y difícil.

Such insights put to rest the century-old debate on nature versus nurture: do our genes or our experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other; it's like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width.

para conseguir que hagamos lo que le interesa, la naturaleza lo convierte en un placer».

Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flowers, and so many grade school teachers are single.