Quotes About Nature

There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres.

Thus have I, as well as I could, gathered a posey of observations as they grew; and if some rue and wormwood be found among the sweeter herbs, their wholesomeness will make amends for their bitterness.

We are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.

There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.

No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for the existence of a snow-flake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.

Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.

on the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird.

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.

Taking a final pleasure in what the wind can neither proclaim nor destroy, I am a student of nightfall, I claim no other profession.

Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.

We are all potential fossils, still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker.

As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going beyond the reach of rivers. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

Science can be--and is--used by good men, but in its present sense it can scarcely be said to create them. Science, of course, in discovery represents the individual, but in the moment of triumph, science creates uniformity through which the mind of the individual once more flees away.... Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of mind alone.

I one saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to rebuild a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since i have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree, i think i am entitled to speak for the field mouse. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

Nothing you do in your life will harm the planet in any way, shape or form; Nothing you do in your life will help the planet in any way shape or form. The planet is going to outlive us all!

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape.

the Pacific Northwest has a climate and a geography that makes human beings feel very welcome on the planet.

Ningún hombre que se muera sin haber llorado alguna vez frente al mar puede decir que ha vivido.

Stella, Nathan, and Steven looked at each other in the beams of their headlamps, which they'd clicked on as the twilight thickened. The wind moved the trees again. Darkness was growing complete. The rain was turning to sleet. Despite the sweat over her body, Stella's hands were numb with cold, and her fingers were growing uncooperative. A recipe for hypothermia.

Olivia had also told her that all these trembling aspen trees were connected, one big organism joined by a root network underground. If you cut a tree up on this ridge, the others down in that grove would know. She wondered if they would all feel the pain of an ax strike at once.

Once that whole valley was sage scrub. Nothing more. Until one little beaver dammed a small stream." Silence. Wind rustles through autumn grasses. "A small act," he says quietly, "that reshaped the future." He looks at Ash. "The past doesn't always have to write the future.

Nothing could hold back time or tide, or weather, or what was going to come out of this now . . .