Quotes About Nature

A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she'd get an ovation.

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. —RACHEL CARSON

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There's no other explanation: almost all the tree's mass has come from the very air.

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.

Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good - as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain's sting and the smell of living soil - the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

The polite applause of aspens.

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

For there is hope of a tree, if it goes down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender branches will not cease. Though the root grows old in the earth, and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs. But man, man wastes away and dies and gives up the ghost, and where is he?

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.

Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries.

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute.

I wouldn't need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this-- this , the growing rings of light and water and stone--would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.

Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.