Quotes About Nature

Si la hierba puede andar —sentenció el phooka—, un muchacho puede acabar plantado.

Man was not designed to eat pills and powders and all the other chemicals they pump you full of. We were meant to live off the land in harmony with it. Not in some safety bubble.

The Land of Room Enough, and Time.

The sky lightened now. Far ahead, they could see where the Pacific half of the blizzard had reached the Chuska range. Its cold, wet air met the dry, warmer air on the New Mexico side at the ridgeline. The collision produced a towering wall of white fog, which poured down the slopes like a silent slow-motion Niagara.

I heard the Watersprinkler playing his flute.

A Navajo, like a rancher anywhere, would need access to water, to grazing, to a road, and above all a soul-healing view of—in the words of one of the curing chants—"beauty all around you.

The trees at Tse Bonito Park were yellow, the roadsides were streaked with the purple of the last surviving October asters, and overhead the sky was the dark, blank blue.

What was it about white men that caused them to plant grass in places where grass couldn't possibly grow without them fiddling with it all the time?

This immensity, dappled with cloud shadows and punctuated with assorted mountain peaks, was enough to lift the human spirit.

I think from where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

was not a Navajo concept, this idea of adjusting nature to human needs. The Navajo adjusted himself to remain in harmony with the universe. When nature withheld the rain, the Navajo sought the pattern of this phenomenon—as he sought the pattern of all things-to find its beauty and live in harmony with it.

that the only goal for man was beauty, and that beauty was found only in harmony, and that this harmony of nature was a matter of dazzling complexity.

Memorize places," his uncle had told him. "Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind.

make the deer come out where you could shoot them. But maybe the kangaroo rats

And sometimes, sitting in my chair I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions– like the deaf, defoliated silence just after a train has thundered past the platform, just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again –and the wildflowers that grow beside the tracks wobble wildly on their little stems, then gradually grow still and stand motherless and vertical in the middle of everything.

If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.

In other words, God's love is not a characteristic of God. For example, maybe you've heard someone say, "Sure, God is loving, but his love is balanced with his justice." Or, "Without justice, love is not possible." These statements talk of God's love as an attribute of God. But, for Eastern Christians, God's very nature is love. It's not an aspect of God's being, it is God's very being.

Maybe you've heard someone say, "Sure, God is loving, but his love is balanced with his justice" or "Without justice, love is not possible." These statements speak of God's love as an attribute of God. But, for the Divinity model, God's very nature is love. Love is not an aspect of God's being; love is God's very being.

Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph—at least in the short run—over more ethically sensitive competitors.

Bilbo takes a mallet to a crab, smashing it!

The body is the garden of the soul.