Quotes About Nature

De hellingen van de berg dragen het leven, niet de top.

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.

It's happening, just from the warming of the sun, the road and green praire farmland and buffeting wind coming together. And soon it is nothing but beautiful warmth and wind and speed and sun down the empty road. The last chills of the morning are thawed by the warm air. Wind and more sun and more smooth road.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.

The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat

If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both 'Nature' and 'Nature's laws' are creations of our own imagination.

So we move down the empty road. I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road.

People see essentialism embedded in bloodlines—i.e., genes.

Science provides us with some of the most elegant, stimulating puzzles that life has to offer. It throws some of the most provocative ideas into our arenas of moral debate. Occasionally, it improves our lives. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg

by the time you finish this book, you'll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are "biological" and those that would be described as, say, "psychological" or "cultural." Utterly intertwined.

Cuando haya acabado de leer este libro, verá que, al hablar de los distintos aspectos de un comportamiento, no tiene sentido distinguir entre los que son «biológicos» y aquellos que podrían ser descritos por ejemplo como «psicológicos» o «culturales». Están totalmente entrelazados.

The subject is also fascinating because of the nature of the revisionism—neuroplasticity radiates optimism. Books on the topic are entitled The Brain That Changes Itself, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life, hinting at the "new neurology

These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people's scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another?

If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.

Watson was pathologically caught inside a bucket having to do with the environmental influences on development. "I'll guarantee . . . to train him to become any type." Yet we are not all born the same, with the same potential, regardless of how we are trained.*

Bears were so abundant that Boone killed 155 in one season, and he killed one monster bear that weighed between five hundred and six hundred pounds.

Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?...He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage...

Do you ever think about the rocks? he said. How does that go? Maybe they are alive and their hearts beat once every thousand years and they only need to take a breath every five hundred.

Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.

I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun.

You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.