Quotes About Nature

The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past.

By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more "natural" than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.

The special task of environmental historians is to tell stories that carry us back and forth across the boundary between people and nature to reveal just how culturally constructed that boundary is -- and how dependent upon natural systems it remains.

I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.

The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.

Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson, Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green. Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.

Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine - 'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.

The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by, As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky.

The rugged trees are mingling Their flowery sprays in love; The ivy climbs the laurel To clasp the boughs above.

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, And the year smiles as it draws near its death.

Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man.

One smile on the brown hills and naked trees, And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast, And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze, Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.

Autumn... the year's last, loveliest smile.

The hills,Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun.

The groves were God's first temples.

To him who in the love of Nature holdsCommunion with her visible forms, she speaksA various language.

And the yellow sunflower by the brook, in autumn beauty stood.

All at once A fresher wind sweeps by, and breaks my dream, And I am in the wilderness alone.

All that tread, The globe are but a handful to the tribes, That slumber in its bosom.

The groves were God's first temple

Go forth under the open sky, and list to Nature's teachings.

The sounds I had heard seemed worthy to mingle with this bright and perfumed atmosphere, and to thrill the beautiful scenery around me.

Loveliest of lovely things are they, On earth, that soonest pass away. The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.

It was the nature of the thing:No moon outlives its leaving night,No sun its day. And I went onRich in the loss of all I singTo the threshold of waking light,To larksong and the live, gray dawn.So night by night, my life has gone.