Quotes About Nature

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of man.

In other words, it is precisely because we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge that we have nothing to educate with for the salvation of our order.

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

Their [cats] effortless passing between the wild and domestic worlds suggests the kind of grace we need as a species to move between nature and culture.

The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life - and the course of evolution itself - refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

In New York, it's already clear that just a few months of neglect by city maintenance teams would lead to the streets becoming a burgeoning forest of Chinese tree-of-heaven seedlings.

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

My late friend Roger Deakin always used to excuse his failure to weed his vegetable patch by saying 'weeds do keep the roots moist'.

We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . .

They turn up at the same time of the year, every year, like garrulous relatives you wished lived just a little further away.

Weeds made the first vegetables, the first home medicines, the first dyes.

Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.

Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In so doing they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne.

But I soon found that I was seeing the aura of the flowers. A wonderful light shone out from every little petal and flower, and the whole was a blaze of splendor.

You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long)

The stunted pines elude capture in a thousand sidetracked increments. The wind will never understand them. Like us it is forced to go on.

History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man.

Home, I whispered. is where the river flows humming through the willows. Home is milkweed in your hair, with hemlock moss your pillows. Home, if you could only know, is anyplace I see you --- it's in your heart and from the start I've known my home would be you. FROM BOOK _ZAZOO_ , p.21, Chapter 3

The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I've been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I've let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.

A dolphin's smile is the greatest deception. It creates the illusion that they're always happy.

I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.