Quotes About Nature

Even though he saw an entire field covered with flowers, Chihaya never thought to pick them. Instead, he took me to see the place where they were blooming.

Let me speak as a physician, Lady Blue: the primary cause of your melancholy is that for too long you have lacked contact with the earth, with water, with green and growing plants. You are not the kind of person who can live apart from these things. Like a wild bird in a cage, you will lose the will to live. You have to get outside.

When I was a child, my grandmother used to mix a paste for me of flour and water. Then I would go out into the yard and pick grass and make drawings out of pencil and grass pasted to the paper.

The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need.

The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.

Cultural differences are so persistent because when our native culture is learned and wired into our brains, it becomes "second nature," seemingly as "natural" as many of the instincts we were born with. The tastes our culture creates - in foods, in type of family, in love, in music - often seem "natural", even though they may be acquired tastes.

Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves. While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be "improved," the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems.

The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.

Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?

Why always "not yet"?  Do flowers in spring say "not yet"? 

So it does turn out that we do need to begin by contemplating the profound nature of self and other. Because if you change the leaves and branches but leave the roots intact, you run the risk of reverting to type.

What seems to have been at work is the axiom, rarely made articulate, but deeply held by many people, that affronted nature will always avenge itself on guilty humanity.

One is reminded of the adage that whether elephants fight or make love, the grass gets trampled.

This tendency, greatly amplified, characterizes many of the more uncompromising biophilic thinkers who, in trying to construe love of nature as an ethical, rather than merely an esthetic, imperative, become ensnared in the constraints of their own subjectivity.21 These they mistake for sacred law. The most damning thing about this brand of nature worship is that it leads to outright contempt for scientific rationality.

Sharks are more "natural" than life rafts-at least according to vulgar understanding-but, if forced to dive off a sinking ship and swim for my life, I'd rather meet a life raft than a shark! I daresay that radical environmentalists would share this view if the choice were actually forced upon them.2

Needless to say, dualistic thinking is nonetheless commonplace. In Western society, until recently, the overriding tendency was to accord a moral dignity to the "human" which elevated it above the merely natural. Of course this was done by associating humanity with an even higher realm inhabited by God, the angels, the saints, and so forth.

My mathematics is helpless against the sea.

I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

The day Was like the buzzard on the pine.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.