Quotes About Nature

Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.

Air you breathe holds the breath of all things.

That evening the men worked late to finish and I raked the fields in the dusk with Alison, stopping to pick the dog-roses which were like white stars in the hedges, then hastening after my sister. Dumbledores boomed as they struck our dresses, a hedgehog walked in the path, and we could hear the barking of a fox in the wood. Night

She wouldn't be sad, she didn't care if she were ugly; she had accepted her wistful elfin face as she accepted the birds and trees, as something which was part of the earth.

The smooth beeches held up their glass-clear leaves to the sun, and the light strained through them like water through a sieve.

Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable.

the hilly wilds of Cork and Kerry…That was as far

Every man is what environment and heredity make him.

Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is…

Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.

On a clear day you can see Prince Edward Island , we would say. Not "forever", just Prince Edward Island.

When the Canada geese fly north in spring, there is a leader who points the way, a leader at the apex of the V as the formation moves across the land. Those who follow must believe that the leader is doing the best he can but there is no guarantee that all journeys will end in salvation for everyone involved.

Over me green branches hang A blackbird leads the loud song; Above my penlined booklet I hear a fluting bird-throng. The cuckoo pipes a clear call Its dun cloak hid in deep dell; Praise to God for this goodness That in woodland I write well.

What birds are these wildgeese—flying from precincts where the earth and oceans end— with their enormous wings and speckled throats?

Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.

Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. Women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should assume a responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them.

Socrates too thought that living according to the opinions of others was an illness. But he did not urge men to look for a source for producing their own unique opinions, or criticize them for being conformists. His measure of health was not sincerity, authenticity or any of the other necessarily vague criteria for distinguishing a healthy self. The truth is the one thing most needful; and conforming to nature is quite different from conforming to law, convention or opinion.

The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of naturewhichever is convenient. The principle of contradiction has been repealed.

Our minds must make an enormous effort to find the natural sweetness of life in its fullness. The way back is at least as long as the one that brought us here. For Hobbes and Locke nature is near and unattractive, and mans movement into society was easy and unambiguously good. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the movement was hard and divided man.

It is sometimes said that these advantaged youths have less need of our attention and resources, that they already have enough. But they, above all, most need education, inasmuch as the greatest talents are most difficult to perfect, and the more complex the nature the more susceptible it is to perversion.

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

The tree feels splintery, nasty to my touch; it feels Floridian, more reptile than vegetable, more stucco than stone. I do loathe this state, their Elba.

Spring is the earth forgiving itself.)

Once she stopped to pluck a pink rhododendron flower that was just coming into bloom and took it back to the ward with her, twirling it in her hands.