Quotes About Nature

Respected political and military leaders saw the world as a Darwinian battleground, where the fittest race would emerge triumphant from a savage fight to the death.

Think of some part of nature that you love - a particular forest, say. Do you expect the forest to love you back? Does it worry you that the forest cannot love you back? Does it make you love the forest any the less?

Children are born pantheists. They see reality unshaped by culture or language. The whole world seems divine to them, full of mystery and power.

All things were interconnected with a sacred bond. Nature was in a process of constant change, using the universal substance to mould now a horse, then when the horse dies a tree, then a man. It was crucial, Marcus believed, for us to realize that we were part of the universe and to be in harmony with it:

The ideal of Taoism was to live in harmony with the Tao and to cultivate a simple and frugal life, avoiding unnecessary action: "Being one with nature, he [the sage] is in accord with the Tao.

When Tung Kuo Tzu asked Chuang Tzu where the Tao was, he replied that it was in the ant, the grass, the clay tile, even in excrement: "There is nowhere where it is not . . . There is not a single thing without Tao.

But many atheists have been uncomfortable with the purely negative. Many have had a profoundly spiritual or religious awe and humility towards nature and the Universe. As Carl Sagan wrote in Pale Blue Dot: "A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

They felt the need to go beyond Atheism, which simply denies the existence of a personal creator God and takes no positive positions about how we should live our lives or how we should feel about the Universe/Nature.

The pantheist "God" is the community of all beings. It is not a He, or a She, or an It. It is a "We," and a we in the broadest and most inclusive sense, embracing everything from rocks and algae, through butterflies and humans, to suns and planets.

The day before yesterday we were atoms in the heart of a burning star - yesterday we were dust in a collapsing proto-star - today we are living humans - tomorrow we may be soil, beetles, grass, trees, birds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

Even the bleakest, cruelest soul can have its tender spots. Even the harshest desert has its pools, its shady trees and gentle streams.

A vida é como um lago para onde uma criança ociosa atira uma pedrinha e, a partir desse ato, as ondas espalham-se para o exterior. Errado. A vida é um ribeiro: não uma torrente de água a galgar as margens, apenas um ribeirinho vulgar e insignificante, com os redemoinhos, turbilhões e vórtices normais [...]

The wish of all things is to continue to be what they are. --Spinoza

se había transformado en algo que era más, y a la vez, menos que humano

There is a way of looking at things when you are alone in the woods at night. You see more clearly the things at the corner of the eye, and hear all the little crackling noises, the saw of your own breath, even the thumping of your heart. All so clear. It is as though on stepping out of the city an older part of the brain starts to work again. The part that remembers flint and bone and ice.

a flash of silver just below the surface.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality, because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products.

Green is the soul of Spring. Summer may be dappled with yellow, Autumn with orange and Winter with white but Spring is drenched with the colour green.

Snow harder! Snow more! Snow blizzards galore! I can't get enough Of the fluffy white stuff! Snow! Snow! Snow! Snow a ton! Snow a heap! Snow ten feet deep! I wouldn't cry If it snowed til July. Snow! Snow! Snow!

This change in religious belief would have dramatic consequences for the world's history, the first stage in a revolution that has made our world of today what it is. It oversaw the move from faith in gods of immanence, spiritual representations of the forces of nature, deities who inhabit the world and wear the natural phenomena they represent like a suit of clothes, to gods of transcendence, deities outside, beyond and above nature rather than part of it.

Dans notre société, quelles sont les classes qui aiment le travail pour le travail ? Les paysans propriétaires, les petits bourgeois, qui les uns courbés sur leurs terres, les autres acoquinés dans leurs boutiques, se remuent comme la taupe dans sa galerie souterraine, et jamais ne se redressent pour regarder à loisir la nature.