Quotes About Nature

A vine cannot behave olively, nor an olive tree vinely – it is impossible, inconceivable.

What are you? A human being. If you think of yourself as a unit apart, then it is in accordance with your nature to live to old age, to be rich, and be healthy. But if your view of yourself involves being part of a whole, circumstances may make it right for you to be sick, go on a dangerous journey, endure poverty, even die before your time. Don't complain.

But prove to me that one who holds inferior judgments can prevail over a man who is superior in his judgments. You never will prove it, nor anything like it; for the law of nature and of god is this: Let the better always be superior to the worse… Thus I, too, lost my lamp to a thief because the thief was better at keeping awake than I. But he bought a lamp at the price of being a thief, a rogue, and a brute. That seemed to him a good bargain. Epictetus

What's odd in asserting that what's bad for anything is what runs contrary to its nature? You say it for everything else, why make humanity the sole exception?

Nothing is in reality either pleasant or unpleasant by nature but all things become so through habit.

This World is one great City, and one if the substance whereof it is fashioned: a certain period indeed there needs must be, while these give place to those; some must perish for others to succeed; some move and some abide: yet all is full of friends--first God, then Men, whom Nature hath bound by ties of kindred each to each.

Make the best use of what is in our power, and treat the rest in accordance with its nature. And what is its nature? However God decides.

Look at the matter in this way. Since we can see that a dog is fitted by nature to do one thing, and a horse to do another, and a nightingale, if you like, to do yet another, it wouldn't be absurd for one to declare overall that each of them is beautiful precisely in so far as it best fulfils its own nature; and since each is different in nature, it would seem to me that each of them is beautiful in a different way. Isn't that so? The student agreed.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and rais'd in Ocean's pearly caves First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.

Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!

By firm immutable immortal laws Impress'd on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE, Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife Organic forms, and kindled into life; How Love and Sympathy with potent charm Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm; Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains, And bind Society in golden chains.

Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.

Wilderness An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. —Howard Zahniser Perhaps

How wonderful to wander among virgin hills! I suppose whiteness is a symbol of purity (skin color being an exception) and how pure I found that world. As you've heard me say many times, the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing. They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru. If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.

Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty

I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Back in civilization I begin the questioning," wrote Randy. "What to do with life? What kind of life? In wilderness this ceases; the questions aren't answered, they dissolve."   BEFORE

Dana asked his wife on numerous occasions, "Wouldn't it be nice to live where you could walk in the woods on a Sunday afternoon?" It became Esther's dream also.

But ever since I was old enough to be cynical I have been visiting national parks, and they are a cure for cynicism, an exhilarating rest from the competitive avarice we call the American Way…. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst. —Wallace Stegner, 1983

And then I'm gonna step right into the wilderness. Just live on berries and shit. Not bother anybody. Not hurt anything. Something I have to do, man.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Man was nature's mistake—she neglected to finish him—and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Some people, were born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people, dance.