Quotes About Nature

Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend. die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose.

Threadsuns above the grayblack wastes. A tree- high thought grasps the light-tone: there are still songs to sing beyond mankind.

Life always finds a way

The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one. The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers? Bertolt Brecht, On Violence

the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad.

My class had sprouted lima beans in paper cups the year before. I now placed a bean in each of the holes. I covered them up, pressing the soil down firmly with my fingertips. I opened my thermos and watered them all. And I vowed to myself that those beans would thrive.

The setting sun had turned the blue sky a brilliant orange, then soft pink merging to pearl; the plum velvet of night had come out of the east, spangled with stars.

Japanese goldfish, With your gossamer tail, You are the loveliest creature I have ever seen. Japanese kitten, Put your tongue back in where it belongs And go away. I know exactly what you are thinking.

He was a friend to all things wild, and the wild things repaid him with their friendship.

Ha ha! How do you like my storm?

it is the peculiar power of flowers that while they are universal and spread their species over the world, they invoke in each beholder the dearest and most cherished memories.

When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.

When reeling a fish in to not simply feel "the power of wildness intimately but the same time recognize the right of that wildness to continue".

If you would experience a landscape, you must go alone into it and sit down somewhere quietly and wait for it to come in its own good time to you.

A mountaintop is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place.

Wildness is not found but revealed.

When the uniqueness of a place sings to us like a melody, then we will know, at last, what it means to be at home.

We are helpless as babies about this. Whatever we can see and do not understand and must acknowledge, we make over in our own image. The moon, the sea, the prairie — all present insurmountable barriers of distance. We cross them on the craft of egocentricity. We make the moon the marker of time and the dwelling place of desire; the sea the mirror, the bosom; the prairie the breadbasket.

To live on the prairie is to daydream. It is the only conceivable response to such immensity. It is when we are smallest that our daydreams come quickest.

the materials for the nest must be collected and woven strand by strand . . . . Such a birdy method may at first seem absurd to the forward-thinking nest maker, but soon it will be found that the pleasures of the project are not derived from efficiency.

Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father's fading was because he realized this: My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels ...

Men act as if we just crawled from the swamp, our webbed feet dripping brackish water as we waddle ashore, seeking to mate with a female or, lacking that, a warm patch of mud.

We are a vain, greedy, and foolish people. We squander and spoil, befoul and defile. We take for granted the beauties and bounties of nature, but in the end nature will out. We will dry up or smoke out or choke on our own waste. In the end we will pay the ultimate price.

With women, my wiring shorts out. My senses respond to the physical and the chemical, the scent and sheen of her. Evil could not possibly reside in the form of this angel. Or could it? Sure, I'm politically incorrect. I admit it; I confess; guilty as charged. I am, Your Honor, the lowest of the species, still wet from the swamp, webbed feet fossilized in the mud. I am a Man!