Quotes About Nature

More men have become great through practice than by nature.

Gli uomini per loro natura sono portati a disprezzare i deboli e lusingare i forti.

The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished.

It is too facile to say that the way to follow Tao is to simply go along with the flow of life. Sometimes, like the carp, we must know when to go it alone.

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

All children are essentially criminal.

Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

I knew every raindrop by its name.

It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

Much contemporary popular writing on genetics assumes that it should be possible to reconstruct living systems from the bottom up, starting with the raw DNA code. And that is precisely the sort of procedure we have just seen to be so entirely impracticable. Clearly, we need first to narrow the options. And there is only one way to do that; we must observe how nature itself has narrowed the options.

There's an unseen force which lets birds know when you've just washed your car.

I have traveled outside the mountains, but never lived apart from them. I always feared mountains would be as jealous, as unforgiving, as any spurned lover. Leave them and they may never take you back. Besides, I never felt a need to go. There is enough to study in these hills to last a lifetime.

Every way I turned the lush green peaks towered over me. Had it been winter or spring, they would have been iron gray or dappled with pink and white dogwood, sarvis, and redbud, but always they would be there, the mountains, their heights rounded by the elements like relics worn smooth by the hands of reverent pilgrims.

It always amazed her to see the treasures low tide turned up.

Low tide exposed the good and the bad, she supposed.

It was beautiful up here. Full of pine and mountain views, and the kind of quiet that made your thoughts loud.

The sun rode low in the sky, the storm clouds long gone. The ocean was calm today, not a white cap to be found. One would never have believed there'd been a storm less than forty-eight hours ago.

Denise Kiernan

noted naturalist and Sierra Club cofounder John Muir,

Do not dissect a rainbow. In other words, do not destroy a beautiful phenomenon by overanalyzing it.

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies....