Quotes About Nature

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasel.

Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fell into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words. Find passion as large as your fear. The way out of your mind is via the world.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

Other animals don't have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn't progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

The way out of your mind is via the world.

Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars. Serbian proverb

The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.

It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilized surface of a human being. It wasn't the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they'd gone to conceal it. A Homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill.

You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books.

The hardiest plant in the world is the purple saxifrage. It has delicate-looking flowers, with purple petals that seem as though they might blow away in the wind, yet it thrives in the Arctic. The flowers survive by clustering together, low to the ground, offering each other shelter against the hardest conditions on earth.

To be a part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

You are lucky to be alive. Inhale and take in life's wonders. Never take so much as a single petal of a single flower for granted.

Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.

The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised - almost everything she has bought and worked for and consumed - had taken her away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.

You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don't worry about it.

Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars.

Under the Greenwood Tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird's throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see no enemy But winter and rough weather.