Quotes About Nature

Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.

Ditto for the eleven people killed in Antelope Canyon. Venturing into these canyons during the afternoon or evening is significantly more risky.

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

It's not that the Midwest lacks bustle; it's just that away from the cities, the deadlines are imposed by the earth and its seasons.

you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do.

Divinity, not machines. Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity.

sun sinking, sky filling with pink and orange light, great expanses of land just sitting, seemingly waiting for the return of big creatures to make it small again.

There's immeasurable glory in riding a tractor. You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it's opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat, 'Is it time?' And the wheat says, 'Yes, friend, it's time.' And then you know to begin the harvest.

He'd taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity.

Once beyond Philadelphia, the state opens into hills and mountains and broad, flat valleys.

If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use.

I feel most at home in the water. I disappear. That's where I belong.

Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

So that's us: processed corn, walking.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.

Somewhere a cicada conversed irritably with the night, then fell silent.

And if Glass believed in a god, surely it resided in this great western expanse. Not a physical presence, but an idea, something beyond man's ability to comprehend, something larger.