Quotes About Nature

In my chest, my own heart was breaking. On my cheek, the lily reminded me who I was.

No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child.

The rose does not bloom without thorns. True, but would that the thorns did not outlive the rose.

tree frogs may be small be can make a big difference.

a phrase he attributed to Voltaire: "That calm courage in the midst of tumult, that serenity of a soul in danger, which is the greatest gift of nature for command." Gavin called it "the courage of two o'clock in the morning

a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad. How often you will have me near you when wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm…. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute, not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.

It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West – but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God – the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God – forever fresh upon it

We try and map boundaries, and to string fence - we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life.

I do believe that clean air, clean water, and wild mountains and old forests are our birthrights; that a wild and healthy landscape is, or should be, a constitutional right, a freedom, to be protected and celebrated. And as with any right, there is an attendant responsibility.

There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards—the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty.

I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau's time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present.

There are no new stories in nature, only new observers.

The thing about nature is that each species does what it's best at. That's why it's all so locked together. I'm certain that at its center is some kind of peace or unity or harmony - the white light people speak of having when they come back from "the dead." And what does our species do best? We construct artificial systems wherein we are mighty predators, or mighty thinkers, or sagacious, benevolent rulers of the universe - allies with God even.

Yet how lovely, to think that a person can live forever as long as one last bird sings in the dying light of one more day.

How do you not love a place where the faded beads from a parade six years before still hang in the branches of the live oak trees.

Her driveway is about a quarter-mile long. She walks to the mailbox, for her health. "Now they all follow her in a straight line, all of them, there and back," my brother told me.

You get to thinking of a place as yours, after a while, and you grit your teeth over the Red Bull cans and Mountain Dew bottles and takeout chicken bones scattered through one of the prettiest places on earth. But while any half-wit can toss their trash out into a country road, it takes a rarefied, soulless son of a bitch to slink out here to throw away a good dog. He

Some men were just born beside a river of melancholy. Some men lived a lifetime there.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe

You have never slept until you have been rocked to sleep by a willow tree, the whole think creaking as the wind pushes it back and forth. There was something about being up high, up in the green and the breeze, something safe about it.

She was as pretty as sunshine on roses.

Trees help reduce storm water runoff by intercepting falling rain and holding a portion of it on the leaves and bark. A mature tree can hold 100 gallons of water on its many surfaces during a rainstorm. Part of this water soon evaporates and the rest is gradually released into the soil below.

However, popular culture defines Nature as an "other," a near-sentient force operating beyond the bounds of human community. I was raised with that notion and can empathize with the nostalgia often accompanying it, but I can't accept the idea of a separate Nature any more than I believe digital data resides in "The Cloud" (the data resides in machinery that is typically plugged into a wall socket).