Quotes About Nature

Until I met Timmy I'd always thought coffee was a mineral that occurred in nature as tiny crystals and was mined like coal.

While the physical scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century asked, "Where are we?" in the universe; and the social scientists of the nineteenth century inquired, "Who are we?" in our relationship to nature and the unconscious; we're now at a time of history when the question is "How are we?" in our interconnectedness and interdependence with life. I

When professional work is decomposed, constituent tasks tend to be allocated to the least costly sources consistent with the quality and nature of the work involved.

Cagayan River.

Brillat-Savarin and Symons were right to say that we have tamed nature with fire. We should indeed pin our humanity on cooks.

We are not merely the most intelligent of animals. We also have a rare and perplexing combination of moral tendencies. We can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.

That great human brain is nature's most frightening product. But it is simultaneously nature's best, most hopeful gift. If we are cursed with a demonic male temperament and a Machiavellian capacity to express it, we are also blessed with an intelligence that can, through the acquisition of wisdom, draw us away from the 5-million-year stain of our ape past. Intelligence is something we are familiar with, an old book, and old friend.

that land's my home. That land's my deepest wish, my wildest dream, the only prayer and the only temple i'm ever gonna need.

That open country is so huge you can feel lost and abandoned in it or you can work to feel a part of it, like ya belong to it and it belongs to you. Like a part of you is rock and stone and stream and all the open sky. Ya get past lonesome then...them creatures is all my family and i'm family to them as well.

He held his hand up to his face and licked the wound. Blood. Old-tasting and rich like the sediment of a river. He looked at Jimmy. The blood on their faces meant they were part of the same stream now, bobbing in the current, borne forward effortlessly under the slowly twirling dome of the sky.

Jimmy used to say we're a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time indians, was all about learnin' to live with that mystery. Not solving it, not comin' to grips with it, not even tryin' to guess it out. Just bein' with it. I guess I wish I'da learned the secret to doing that.

Late in the evenings I'd walk into the trees, stride through the bush until I was wrapped in it, cocooned. The stars that pinwheeled above spun a thousand light years away. Time, mystery, departure and union were there all at once. I wondered if this was what it meant to be Indian, Ojibway. A ritual. A ceremony, ancient and simple and personal. If I could have borne it with me into the day-to-day life of the camp, things might have been different.

I felt as though nothing had changed. I felt as though the only thing I had done was quit drinking. Only the land offered me any kind of solace.

Alles ist nach seiner Art: an ihr wirst du nichts ändern

Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?

Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond, In mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz.

Ask us, prophet, how we shall callOur natures forth when that live tongue is allDispelled, that glass obscured or brokenIn which we have said the rose of our love and the cleanHorse of our courage, in which beheldThe singing locust of the soul unshelled,And all we mean or wish to mean.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changedBy a chameleon's tuning his skin to it.

Apology" A word sticks in the wind's throat; A wind-launch drifts in the swells of rye; Sometimes, in broad silence, The hanging apples distill their darkness. You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair, Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say Softly, forgive me love if I also call you Wind's word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

But I am weary of The winter way of loving things for reasons. — Richard Wilbur, from "Winter Spring," New and Collected Poems (HBJ, 1988)

Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.

Martin Luther, when he walked in the woods, used to raise his hat to the birds and say, 'Good morning, theologians—you wake and sing, but I, old fool, know less than you and worry over everything, instead of simply trusting in the heavenly Father's care.

I found that joy can be acquired like a habit, in the same way as a folded sheet of paper falls naturally into the same fold.