Quotes About Nature

When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream.

Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan? Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden's veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm.

I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.

Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne

To one who has been long in city pent, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament.

On the green of the hill We will drink our fill Of golden sunshine, Till our brains intertwine With the glory and grace of Apollo!

For what has made the sage or poet write but the fair paradise of Nature's light?

I am a shadow now, alas! alas! Upon the skirts of human-nature dwelling Alone: I chant alone the holy mass, While little sounds of life are round me knelling, And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, 310 Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me, And thou art distant in Humanity.

How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us … I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy.

Where are you now? How are the nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance.

Although the style of each varied in crudity, the subjects of the paintings were relatively similar: camellias floating in bowls of water, azaleas tortured into ambitious flower arrangements, magnolias that looked like white windmills.

A incapacidade de contactar com a realidade é a característica de toda a «arte» americana. Qualquer semelhança entre a arte americana e a natureza americana é pura coincidência, mas isso acontece apenas porque a nação, no seu conjunto, não tem contacto com a realidade.

I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.

Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart and you will open your valve.

This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America's "art." Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality.

But that was the nature of love: one did not offer it with any assurance that it would change the world, even if in the end it was the only thing that could.

At the same time King David had told how God's truth was written in nature for men to read, he had also begged to be kept free from 'the great transgression': doing wrong when one believes one is doing right. How easy, when one followed the promptings of the traitorous heart, to convince oneself that pure selfishness is the ultimate selflessness, that desire is fate, that murder is self-sacrifice.

I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain.

The winter loves me', he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, 'I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.' I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue.

As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.

I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.

there was a breath of widening life in the morning air--something hard to describe--

it also meant mornings of glory such as this one, in which the snow, white almost to blueness, lay like a soft comforter over the hills, and birches and pines indestructibly held their ground, rigid lines against the snow and sky, very thin and very strong like Vermonters.