Quotes About Nature

Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?

Start admiring the vastness of the forest and a tree will surely fall on you, bashing your skull for the crime of perspective.

What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?

Hope had finally learned to live in the present. Often, when she found herself in a space of tremendous comfort, usually out in nature, or when her children were safe all around her and on the verge of going to bed, she forced herself to take stock. Here you are, Hope, she told herself. What a beautiful moment. You may never again be here at this spot, enjoying the calm. This habit of hers, to acknowledge the immediate and elusive joy of the present, kept her sane.

Of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to gluttony. Once engaged, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself.

Almost simultaneously their eyes alighted on a small opening in the twisted branches of the trees, affording them a direct line of sight to the majestic Verrazzano Bridge. Together the women gazed at the slate-gray metal towers soaring skyward, the steel cables delicately draped from one tower to the other, ascending and descending, the small squares and larger rectangles moving back and forth over the curved roadway.

Place the tip of a stick in a clear brook and you'll see it "bend" underwater because the speed of light is literally slower beneath the surface than it is in air.

Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster.

The challenge for us is to realise our unity with all life, and even with the inanimate world around us. The seas with their currents, the atmosphere and the continents of the earth are all in motion, stirring with their own kinds of life. Our malaise as a civilised people comes in large measure from our ability to distance ourselves from nature and from one another. A real therapy is one with a vision, not only of the individual person, but also of how the whole planet is to be healed.

I send my friends e-mail messages about the progress of my garden, especially of my roses. It left them with the impression, I think, that I was concerned with nothing else. I felt no urgency in correcting that notion. People obsessed with their gardens have probably caused the least suffering in the world of any category of men.

Man, made after God's image, was a nobler creation than twinkling sparks in the sky, or than the larger and more useful lamp of the moon.

We aren't a curse upon the world. We are her new eyes. Her brain, testes, ovaries . . . her ambition and her heart. Her voice. So sing. (556)

They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation.

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.

The people we admire the most are rooted in nature, but have surpassed nature.

The Orchid and the Dandelion (La orquídea y el diente de león)

People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from "crooked timber"— from Immanuel Kant's famous line, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.

The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.

We need the sea. We need a place to stand and touch and listen - to feel the pusle of the world as the surf rolls in.

I have not yet walked the forest trails, high meadows, snows and rocks of the Alpine Lakes area of the Cascades; even so, I do not feel myself a stranger there. Great many wild places of Earth I have not visited, and never shall be able to, but I have known some of them intimately, with delight, and thus claim citizenship of all the wild place of all the states and nations of all the continents and seas. From citizenship comes responsibility to care.

This land belongs to me, and me to it, even should we never meet boot-to-trail, ice-ax-to-snow, face-to-rain, mouth-to-creek, nose-to-flower, eye-to-sky.

This island of Earth of ours is finite in resources, including wilderness- particularly wilderness. The dwindling worldwide reservoir of wild lands must be the concern of everyone, but especially of those of us who have been privileged to experience wildness, and thus learn its value to the individual human soul and to the spirit of mankind.

Thoreau asked long ago, "What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" We