Quotes About Nature

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

The winds of earth are old and sane But tell me, tell me when you know — What happens to a hurricane That hasn't any place to go?

Gazing at the Sacred Peak What is this ancestor Exalt Mountain like? Endless greens of north and south meeting Where Changemaker distills divine beauty, Where yin and yang cleave dusk and dawn. Chest heaving breathes out cloud, and eyes Open dusk bird-flight home. One day soon, On the summit, peaks ranging away will be small enough to hold, all in a single glance. Tu Fu

Tu Fu's wandering through the thousands of miles of ancestor peaks was always the Tao/Cosmos open to itself- ancestor wandering itself and gazing into itself; thinking itself and feeling itself, lamenting itself, and celebrating itself, writing poems about itself.

Autumn Begins Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen, and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder, summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still. At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers. We

Just do what you do, and then leave: such is the Way of heaven.

Standing Alone Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk. Between river banks, two white gulls Laze, wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill, To and fro, they follow contentment. Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs Still hung. Heaven's loom of origins Tangling our human ways too, I stand Facing sorrow's ten thousand sources. Tu Fu

Amid spring mountains, alone, I set out to find you. Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery Deepens. I follow a stream up into last snow and ice And beyond, dusk light aslant, to Stone Gate forests. Deer roam all morning here, for you harm nothing. Wanting nothing, you know chi gold and silver all Night. Facing you on a whim in such dark, the way Home lost- I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat. Tu Fu

Facing Snow Thin slice of ascending light, radiant arc Tipped aside bellied dark- the first moon Appears, and barely risen beyond ancient Frontier passes, edges into clouds. Silver, Changeless, the Star River spreads across Mountains empty in their own cold. Lucent Frost dusts the courtyard, chrysanthemum Blossoms clotted there with solemn dark. Tu Fu

I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.

To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.

I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.

Human Nature is the only science of man and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

History is the discovering of the constant and universal principles of human nature.

As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning it origin in human nature.

And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion. What never was seen, or heard or, may yet be conceived; not is any thing beyond the power of thought, except what implies as absolute contradiction.

The science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences. [All the other sciences] have a relation, greater or lesser, to human nature. 'Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and could explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reason.