Quotes About Nature

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. "All who can't swim, mount the highest bench," he would cry out, "for the great he-elephant will now make water!

One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.

turning away from the house, from the losses and failures and confinements of his history, to the land, the woods and fields of the old farm, in which he already sensed an endlessly abounding and unfolding promise.

strewn with wildflowers and overhead were making shade. Everybody was busy about the fields and plant beds and gardens. The season had made its claim. And then there came a day of brittle-feeling showers driven over the town by a cold wind that, after the warm days, seemed to come through your clothes in slices.

We'd been living at Grandpa's for a little more than a year when Mrs. Crandel died. And the next day Kate Helen Branch had a baby. Uncle Burley said that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out.

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.

Loving the forest, you enter it to walk and watch. As you observe its manifold and comely life, it enters familiarly into imagination, and so into sympathy. By sympathy the mind in the forest is made at home.

But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky.

But ignorance of when to stop is a modern epidemic; it is the basis of industrial progress and economic growth. The most obvious practical result of this ignorance is a critical disproportion of scale between the scale of human enterprises and their sources in nature.

There are two healings: nature's, and ours and nature's. Nature's will come in spite of us, after us, over the graves of its wasters, as it comes to the forsaken fields. The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.

Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, Suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once again I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before

The value of land, like the value of a life, is unreckonable and absolute.

While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures. It is hardly surprising, then, that there should be some profound resemblances between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us.

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

I remember too how spring came, just when I thought it might stay winter forever, at first in little touches and strokes of green lighting up the bare mud like candle flames, and then it covered the whole place with a light pelt of shadowy grass blades and leaves. And I remember how, as the days and the winds passed over, the foliage shifted and sang.

A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me…. A window that looked out into a tree was a source of inexpressible happiness…

What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly -an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a practical point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there? If we knew nothing of Hell, how would we delight in Heaven should we get there?

We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men, and that has bent my mind and made me think of darkness and wish for the dumb life of roots.

I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking….I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.

it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.