Quotes About Nature

Take no revenge that you have not pondered beneath a starry sky, or on a canyon overlook, or to the lapping of waves and the mewing of a distant gull.

Fear is an instinct, like hunger or anger. We need it to help us survive, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. It lets us know whether we should fight or flee.

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil but from the temper of the sufferer.

The river's injury is its shape.

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

Sometimes I fall back pretty hard on the butterflies and the flowers. What a privilege to have been around for this.

And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. Wendell Berry

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

Il ne nous suffit pas de comprendre nos obligations à l'égard des autres et de la terre; nous devons aussi les ressentir.

I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.

A nuclear reactor is a proposed solution to the energy problem. But like all big-technological solutions, this one solves a single problem by causing many... A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense.

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?

Shall we do without hope? Some days there will be none. But now to the dry and dead woods floor they come again, the first flowers of the year, the assembly of the faithful, the beautiful, wholly given to being.

That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

In relation to the natural world, the pleasure of Americans can be destructive in the same way that their work has already proved to be. It is not, certainly, a conscious destructiveness. But in that very unconsciousness it becomes an aspect of one of our worst national failings: our refusal to admit the need to be conscious. Or to put it more meaningfully: our refusal to admit that unconsciousness, in our time, is almost inevitably destructive.

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

But do the Lords of War in fact hate the world? That would be easy to bear, if so. If they hated their children and the flowers that grow in the warming light, that would be easy to bear. For then we could hate the haters and be right. What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may love the things that they destroy.