Quotes About Nature

This world is painted on a wild dark metal

There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment - now!

In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to the lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon.

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

Look at those vines,' he said. 'Nature is wearing her prettiest clothes.' The effect of this unexpectedly poetic observation was slight spoiled when Massot cleared his throat nosily and spat, but he was right;

It is at a time like this, when crisis threatens the stomach, that the French display the most sympathetic side of their nature. Tell them stories of physical injury or financial ruin and they will either laugh or commiserate politely. But tell them you are facing gastronomic hardship, and they will move heaven and earth and even restaurant tables to help you.

The stones plunked dismally, sinking one after the other.

Dumas's book, Alone Through the Roaring Forties

I am human, all too bloody human.

Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.

The psychologist George Frankl atributes class structure and conflict and most of the ills of society to the sexual class war based on the Oedipul pattern; that is, murderous phallic conflict between males for the favour of the women, those favours being defined by the men themselves. This system is, as it were, only haunted by women, who cannot in it acheive expression or contribute to society anything of their true nature, and are regarded as a kind of castrated man.

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

One Sometimes you're walking through the woods when a stick leaps into the air and strikes you across the back and shoulders several times, then flies away lost in the underbrush.

It's about the girl," she said. "She lived for four years in the forest, never in a house. Growing things, hiding, reading books. We'll go see her; she'll tell us things.

We misunderstand the truth of faith if we think that the nature, revelation, and event of God can be torn apart from each other and compartmentalized in isolation from one another.

The seven oceans are drops of rain...

If all the heavens with all their stars exploded in this valley, they would be but a leaf fluttering in the wind. Here a tiny fish is mightier than a whale and nobody can say why.

You step outside, because real running is done outside, dammit, in the open air, where the endorphins hide.

We are not called by God to die to the "good" parts of who we are. God never asked us to die to the healthy desires and pleasures of life—to friendships, joy, art, music, beauty, recreation, laughter, and nature. God plants desires in our hearts so we will nurture and enjoy them. Often these desires and passions are invitations from God, gifts from him. Yet somehow we feel guilty unwrapping these presents.

Scripture reveals God as an emotional being who feels—a Person.

We are to appreciate nature, people, and all God's gifts, along with his presence in creation—without being ensnared by them. It has rightly been said that those who are the most detached on the journey are best able to taste the purest joy in the beauty of created things.