Quotes About Nature

We simply cannot consider the earth apart from Christ's footsteps imprinted upon it.

Of this much we can be sure: if we love the creation, we will learn from it. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevski counsels, "Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day."4

The handiwork of the Creator can speak to us and teach us if we will listen. Martin Buber tells the story of the rabbi who went to a pond every day at dawn to learn "the song with which the frogs praise God."1

Dallas Willard writes, "Today I continue to believe that people are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to. . . . Given who we are by basic nature, we live—really live—only through God's regular speaking in our souls and thus 'by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"1

Americans today sometimes assume the Founders' references to God or Nature or the Supreme Ruler were just for impact or for propaganda. Not so. These were tightly reasoned statements of legal principles. Your rights to your life, liberty, and property came from your Creator, not the government; these rights cannot be repealed.

Light staggers through the trees. Every moment is filled with other moments.

Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart's Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. — Richard Jackson, Superstition Review issue 2 fall 2008

Is there any way we can purely touch the world again, the way a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into hoping to emerge into a world where—where what? There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret, no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

Now the wind is lifting the eyelid of the lake. I remember my soul breaks open like a seed beneath the ground just to think of you.

The lost leaves measure our years; they are gone as the days are gone.

Let us get of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.

The great sea makes one a great sceptic.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.

To me everything is supernatural.

It is in this marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living things that the joy and the hope of summer reside. Every blade of grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription speaking of hope. So that my hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower.

Oak follows oak, and elm ranks with elm, however many times reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred years!

So trustful are the doves, the squirrels, the birds of the branches, and the creatures of the field. Under their tuition let us rid ourselves of mental terrors, and face death itself as calmly as they do the livid lightning; so trustful and so content with their fate, resting in themselves and unappalled. If but by reason and will I could reach the godlike calm and courage of what we so thoughtlessly call the timid turtle-dove, I should lead a nearly perfect life.

The dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed, steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing. It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind. Fed thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the summer—to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow.

My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.

The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on the strung harp of earth. It is this exquisite undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet accordance with the wonderful instrument of nature.

It is nothing to the green-finches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love

I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being.

I want you to regard Mandrake Press Ltd. solely as your publishers, and not to prejudice the purely commercial side of that purely publishing concern with any of your fits and starts, Thelemite politics, earthquakes, and the other distracting phenomena of art and nature, such as pin pricks, dogmatism, human chess, brawls, faux pas, bravado and braggadocio, pure bluff, brainwaves, and dementia precox, which tend to accompany your too personal intrusion into the world of practical affairs. 13

You can take the boy out of the Devil but not the Devil out of the boy