Quotes About Nature

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Do cats eat bats?… Do bats eat cats?

It's as large as life and twice as natural.

He thought he saw an AlbatrossThat fluttered round the lamp:He looked again, and found it wasA penny postage stamp."You'd best be getting home," he said,"The nights are very damp."

Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

There are many connections between anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy – both assume that man is generous, or at least cooperative, 'in nature'; both shun centralized power; both are best fitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart over codified contract, and so on. But

Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.

Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l'expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de l'homme.

The word 'year' is meaningless as applied to a physical system by itself: it is not the stars or the planets that experience years, still less measure them, but man. This very observation is the result of man's attention to recurrent movements, seasonable events, biological rhythms, measurable sequences. When the idea of a year is projected back upon the physical universe, it tells something further that is important to man: otherwise, it is a poetic fiction.

Only now that village ways are rapidly disappearing throughout the world can we estimate all that the city owes to them for the vital energy and loving nature that made possible man's further development.

The fragrance that permeates his picture of the good life is not the heavy fragrance of rose-petals and incense falling upon languorous couches: it is the fragrance of the morning grass, and the scent of crushed mint or marjoram beneath the feet.

Paradoxically, then, the greatest gains that have been achieved through command of nuclear reaction have been purely spiritual ones: an enriched conception of cosmic realities: a deeper insight into the nature of the universe and of the place that living organisms, and finally man himself, have come to occupy.

Birdsong itself may have awakened the latent musical gifts of man.

Mr. Raney named the porpoises - Sister Woman, and Renford, and Lamar, and St. Elmo - and could recognize them, and call each by its name, even at night, six feet long, some of them, with a million sharp teeth and a naughty grin. Often when he floated past in the boat and watched their playful wheeling, in and out among the cypress knees, he called out to them, "Lamar, we are all alone in the world!" or "Renford, cork is an export product of India!

Birds are waterproof.

It seems obvious when you think about it. We evolved in nature, and our spiritual feelings of oneness and worship come from nature. All of the world religions were founded in rural settings. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born in the desert, where the herding of sheep and the cultivation of grain

Not surprisingly, physical exercise and diet are key to healthy aging; the research proves that beyond any doubt. But serving others, maintaining healthy relationships, being in nature, and having an active spiritual life—topics central to this book—are equally important. Inner and outer aging are close partners. Until we can find the inner enjoyment of which Suzuki spoke, exercise and diet alone will not suffice to make us content.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge.

As I get older, I have a very strong urge to know about stuff. I want to learn the names of trees and birds; that's the sort of knowledge I want to pass on to my son.