Quotes About Nature

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events.

But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;-and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber which thou sittest.

The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye...Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed neither can be perfect without the other.

I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish.

See yonder leafless tree against the sky, How they diffuse themselves into the air, And ever subdividing separate, Limbs into branches, branches into twigs, As if they loved the element, & hasted To dissipate their being into it.

For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The

For flowers that bloom about our feet; For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet; For song of bird, and hum of bee; For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

The ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and monring dew

I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

On him the light of star and moon Shall fall with purer radiance down... Him Nature giveth for defence His formidable innocencn; The mounting sap, the shells, the sea, All spheres, all stonse, his helpers be...

Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature.