Quotes About Nature

As Joseph Campbell once said, watching birds speeding through webs of branches and never even grazing a wing tip, animals may dwell in a realm beyond mistakes, totally present to life in ways our concept-crowded thinking cannot fully understand.

He ran into God many times during the year: felt of him in the warm field-dirt of May; saw his face in the shiny harvest grain; heard his voice among the tops of the Norway pines.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

If there was a road I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves

Alles wat geen natuurwet is, is dogma.

theology requires metaphors and concepts that come from our understanding of nature and therefore from science.

Engineering is the science of economy, of conserving the energy, kinetic and potential, provided and stored up by nature for the use of man. It is the business of engineering to utilize this energy to the best advantage, so that there may be the least possible waste.

Earth teach me to forget myself as melted snow forgets its life. Earth teach me resignation as the leaves which die in the fall. Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone. Earth teach me regeneration as the seed which rises in the spring.

Out of the city, far away With Spring today! Where copse tufted with primrose Give me repose, Wood-sorrel and wild violet Soothe my soul's fret.

The trees are Indian Princes, But soon they'll turn to Ghosts; The scanty pears and apples Hang russet on the bough; Its Autumn, Autumn, Autumn late, 'Twill soon be Winter now. Robin, Robin Redbreast, O Robin dear! And what will this poor Robin do? For pinching days are near.

Tantarrara! the joyous Book of Spring Lies open, writ in blossoms.

Bare twigs in April enhance our pleasure; We know the good time is yet to come.... Bare twigs in Autumn are signs for sadness; We feel the good time is well-nigh past.

Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together, Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather!

Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.

Pluck not the wayside flower; It is the traveler's dower.

In the Angels there was no ????????? or Restoring. First, Because they Fell from the highest top of excellency: Secondly, because in the Fall of Angels, all the Angelical nature did not perish, but by the sin of the first Man all mankind did perish.

Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature.

To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.

Seneca writes, "Nature requires from us some sorrow, while more than this is the result of vanity. But never will I demand of you that you should not grieve at all."1

Henry David Thoreau, for example, doesn't directly mention Stoicism or any of the great Stoics in Walden, his masterpiece, but to those who know what to look for, the Stoic influence is present. In his Journal, Thoreau is more forthcoming. He writes, for example, that "Zeno the Stoic stood in precisely the same relation to the world that I do now.

the "flux and change" of the world around us are not an accident but an essential part of our universe.20