Quotes About Nature

Love is in the greenwood, dawn is in the skies, And Marian is waiting with a glory in her eyes.

Now, if God made the clouds so beautiful, did He not mean us to gaze upon them and be thankful for them?

[N]ow and then an ominous black cloud had blotted-out the sun from our sight, and poured down a deluge till it had spent itself, and then had left the sky glaringly bright and blue...

On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of Species 1855

Our mastery over the forces of nature has led to a rapid growth of population, and a vast accumulation of wealth; but these have brought with them such an amount of poverty and crime, and have fostered the growth of so much sordid feeling and so many fierce passions, that it may well be questioned, whether the mental and moral status of our population has not on the average been lowered, and whether the evil has not overbalanced the good.

It belongs essentially to the advance of civilization as more and more organized increasing domination, that nature takes revenge on the men who have degraded it to mere material for human aims, by ensuring that men can only buy their domination by an ever-increasing suppression of their own nature. The division of nature and man in labour is reflected in the irreconcilability of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

Man can work only as nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.

The use-values coat, linen, etc., in short the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, material and labour. If we subtract the total sum of useful labour embodied in the coat, linen, etc., a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by nature without the help of man.

It is the socio-historical character of Marx's concept of nature which distinguishes it from the outset. Marx considered nature to be 'the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour',3 i.e. he saw nature from the beginning in relation to human activity. All other statements about nature, whether of a speculative, epistemological, or scientific kind, already presuppose social practice, the ensemble of man's technologico-economic modes of appropriation.

The characteristic of the influenza virus that makes it so dangerous and gives rise to epidemic after epidemic is its extreme mutability. It perpetually is changing the nature of its outer surface, which antibodies, the body's most important defense system, must zero in on to be effective.

Both flame and spider enrich themselves by understanding the natures of their prey; and fly and moth return again and again until this is accomplished.

The spell of these terrible solitudes ... cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.

The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.

And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys.

savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.

It is a common trick of Nature – and a profoundly significant one – that, just when despair is deepest, she waves a wand before the weary eyes and does her best to waken an impossible hope.

They talked trees from morning till night. It stirred in her the old subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught her, were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with danger.

Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own.

you look like the spirit of the island, with moss in your hair and wind in your eyes, and sun and stars mixed in your face.

I wish I were not quite so lonely—and so poor. And yet I love both my loneliness and my poverty. The former makes me appreciate the companionship of the wind and rain, while the latter preserves my liver and prevents me wasting time in dancing attendance upon women.

He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.

It's the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.

He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him—whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries

What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death.