Quotes About Nature

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.

Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman's eyes.

Have you heard the saying, Skeaös? 'Cats look down upon Man, and dogs look up, but only pigs dare look Man straight in the eye.'" "Y-yes, God-of-Men." "Pretend that you are a pig, Skeaös." What

mammals, he mutters. can't live with them, can't live without them.

People talk about nature as a mother, but to me she's always been Medea, ready and willing to slaughter her children.

Oliver: Fear is the natural state of anything that dies.

I'm fine with Nature's way, as long as Nature keeps it out of *my* way.

Just because he's a spider doesn't mean he deserves any less concern!

We're not exactly going to the wilderness, Shane. You don't have to take everything. There are vending machines.

It isn't fair, or right, but it's dreadfully human, the way we tear each other apart.

There once was a kindly farmer who found a viper freezing on the ground in the snow. Please help me, the poor creature said, for I am too cold to live. The farmer took the viper and put it inside of his shirt, and the viper began to warm itself and come alive again. But upon coming alive, it bit the farmer most wretchedly, and as the farmer died, he asked the viper, but why? Why when I was so trusting of you? Because I am a viper, the snake replied. And one cannot expect kindness from evil.

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no high-minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.

There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.

Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it even where we have to struggle against it. . . .

Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces. Essay on the Biological Sciences , in: Good Reading (1958)

drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see.

To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

Many children... delight in the small and inconspicuous.

If, having endured much, we have at last asserted out right to know, and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.