Quotes About Nature

Yet the great weakness of linear time is that it obliterates time's recurrence and thus cuts people off from the eternal—whether in nature, in each other, or in ourselves. When we deem our social destiny entirely self-directed and our personal lives self-made, we lose any sense of participating in a collective myth larger than ourselves. We cannot ritually join with those who come before or after us.

We may prefer to see ourselves as masters of nature, controllers of all change and progress, exempt from the seasons of history. Yet the more we balk at seasonality and the more we try to eradicate it, the more menacing we render our view of time—and of the future.

Before, people prized the ability to divine nature's energy and use it. Today, we prize the ability to defy nature's energy and overcome it.

When Aristotle said that poetry is superior to history because history only tells us "what Alcibiades did or had done to him," he had in mind history as the mere compilation of facts. To matter, history has to do more. It has to reconnect people, in time, to what Aristotle called the "timeless forms" of nature.

He was asking for it, and he basically made me do it, and I just weren't powerful enough to hold back the surge that took me over. Blaming me is like blaming the sky for raining.

Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose--all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.

Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled, and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which our whole nature is given.

If you drop one of us naked and alone into the wilderness, you've just fed the creatures of the local forest. But if you drop one hundred of us naked into the wilderness, you've introduced a new top predator to this unfortunate stretch of woods.

Movement is most of what a bird is. When they're dead, they're only feathers and air.

It occurs to me one evening as I'm feeding the birds that all I did was put two birds in the aviary, some food and water and nothing else and now there are six of them. I know this is perfectly natural, it's one of the things life is all about, but to have it happen in my bedroom, under my own eyes, is magic.

Man is the interpreter of nature, science the right interpretation.

It teaches that man is an apostate creature, fallen from his original innocence, degraded in his nature, depraved in his thinking, prone toward evil, not good, and impacted by sin to the very core of his being.

I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out" (Rom. 7:18). As someone has said, even the spirituality we do possess is corrupted by our nature. We have nothing to brag about. On the contrary, God must always give us grace to bear with our faults and mercy to forgive our sins.

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.

Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.

Even the mightiest oak can fall by a gentle touch

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The poet's darling.

The ocean is a mighty harmonist.

Wild is the music of autumnal winds the faded woods.

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,The earth, and every common sight,To me did seemAppareled in celestial light,The glory and the freshness of a dream.It is not now as it hath been of yore—Turn wheresoe'er I may,By night or day,The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

I've watched you now a full half-hour; Self-poised upon that yellow flower And, little Butterfly! Indeed I know not if you sleep or feed. How motionless! - not frozen seas More motionless! and then What joy awaits you, when the breeze Hath found you out among the trees, And calls you forth again!

But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,France standing on the top of golden hours,And human nature seeming born again.