Quotes About Nature

Spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling. The woodwind glissando of the whale's cry.

On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.

Kim Stanley Robinson

I say I do not wish to be counted as an ignoramus and an ingrate toward Nature and toward God. For if they have given me my senses and my reason, why should I defer such great gifts to the errors of some mere man? Why should I believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am?

The evening light would concentrate itself into the band of sky over the black jagged peaks of the Hellespontus, brilliant pinks and silvers and violets shading up into dark indigos and bruised blacks, and their voices would soften in that last part of the twilight Michel called entre chien et loup.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These

It took knowing every rock and plant and animal and fish and bird, that was the way they did it. You had to love the land the way you loved yourself. Because it was you anyway. It took knowing all the other parts of yourself so well that nothing was misunderstood or exploited.

In a high meadow, wild bighorn sheep. Their lambs gambol. When you see that gamboling with your own eyes, you'll know something you didn't know before. What will you know? Hard to say, but something like this: whether life means anything or not, joy is real. Life lives, life is living.

Deer are the sad sacks of American wildlife, so beautiful, so defenseless, so numerous, so dim. Their chief predator is cars.

Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. "Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o'clock; cold and shabby at six.

Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.

You never see anything like it where you live, this I can guarantee. Not one person in 10,000 lives in a place where the stars are visible like they are in the Sierra at night. Dark skies (meaning away from cities), 10,000 feet above sea level: that means thousands of stars. Watch for half an hour and see several meteors streak across the sky, sometimes at cosmological speeds, faster than anything you'll ever see by day.

The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots.

And after I told my six-year-old, grandma died in the accident, after tears and questions she suggested, maybe now is a good time to explain what the man has to do with babies. So i chose one perfect lily from that vase and with the tip of a paring knife slit open the pistil to trace the passage pollen makes to the egg cell- the eggs i then slipped out and dotted on her fingertips, their greenish-white translucent as the air in this blizzard that cannot cool the unbearable heart.

Rogers} sexual aim is "to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.

A man's sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.

Why are black holes so different from all other objects in the macroscopic Universe? Why are they, and they alone, so elegantly simple? If I knew the answer, it would probably tell me something very deep about the nature of physical laws. But I don't know.

HEAR and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild—as wild as wild could be—and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

No amount of culture or civilization can subdue or hide the wanton violence in man.

There's something about being on the backside of a racetrack just before dawn that is truly magical--standing along the rail when the light's just coming up, watching the horses move fluidly across the damp earth, their dark shapes silhouetted against a rainbow sky. You stand there, breathing in the clean air, listening to the steady primal rhythm of a galloping horse, and the rest of the world simply does not exist.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.