Quotes About Nature

In the fall when they burn the stubble off the fields the sun gets this dusty hazy color, and the mare's-tail clouds whipping along near Wakonda Head look like goldenrod bent over by the wind. It's always real pretty. You can almost hear it ring in the sky.

Sometimes—after futile all-nights—deserts fill my work-house and smoking sand gets in my eyes . . . and I must split the swollen cabin to check the dawn, to find: the creek still parties with the moon . . . the thrusting pine and whippoorwills still celebrate the sun. It generally works, and things are cool, but sometimes—after cutting out—nothing out there happens but the night. And those days were best forgotten.

This world . . . belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

In the deepening sky where the spearpoint firs scratch the clouds, already a moon—like a cast-off paring from the setting sun. This is Hank's bell, too.

Not that it was a hard country, but something you must go through a winter of to understand. But that's what you did not know. You knew the cursed look of wanderlust but you did not know the hell that lust was leading you into. You must go through a winter first. . . .

Even a man who is pure of heart And says his prayers at night May turn to a wolf when the wolfbane blooms And the autumn moon is bright.

And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.

It is beyond nature mysticism, beyond deity mysticism, and beyond formless mysticism—it is the reality or the Suchness of each, and thus integrates each in its embrace.

Thus, he says, those who would "eliminate from the universe" what they think of as "inferior beings" would simply "eliminate Providence itself," whose nature it is to "produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.

it is all exactly as it should be, when the robin sings on a glorious morning, and rain drops beat on the temple roof.

The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.

that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.

On a day like this, I can't imagine anything better that might happen in a person's life than for them to start paying attention to birds—to become aware of this magical world that exists all around us, unnoticed by many but totally captivating for those who know its secrets. This kind of spring day, with its bountiful myriads of colorful sprites just arrived from tropical shores, has to be one of the greatest gifts of life on Earth.

The list total isn't important, but the birds themselves are important. Every bird you see. So the list is just a frivolous incentive for birding, but the birding itself is worthwhile.

Birds are beautiful. After a lifetime of study I still love to look at them and listen to them, even the common species.

It was one of those mornings when you realize, with chilling clarity, that birding is a ridiculous activity.

I had figured out something that seemed important: every bird had its place. None was "free as a bird." A few kinds were found all over the continent, but they were the exceptions.

A new perspective was dawning on me. As a crass young bird-lister, I might have said: a trip to the Tortugas is good, because it adds species to the total. But a better viewpoint would be: working on a list is good, because it gives me an excuse to come to the Tortugas. After this Big Year was over, I hoped, I would be wise enough to come back to this place for its own sake.

Until our bodies are made new, like the body Jesus now enjoys, our calling is not to escape fleshly existence, nor to sanctify culture (since it is common, shared by believer and unbeliever, and cannot be made holy), but to so influence our culture as to make it more consistent with the created nature of man, and to sanctify our own lives, because we are also living in the Spirit , with our minds set on things that are above.

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

It is very strange that men should deny a Creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.