Quotes About Nature

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until the egg is laid.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature, opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

The inclination to share thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature.If in pain I wish to let you know it,and ask your sympathy and assistance;and my pleasurable emotions also,I wish to communicate to,and share with you.

all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.

The preceding collection of stories about Einstein the young boy demonstrates the remarkable extent to which his most characteristic personal traits were native rather than acquired.

Whether produced by outsiders or by indigenous people, end-of-the-century discourses about Africa are not necessarily applicable to their object. Their nature, their stakes, and their functions are situated elsewhere. They are deployed only by replacing this object, creating it, erasing it, decomposing and multiplying it. Thus there is no description of Africa that does not involve destructive and mendacious functions.

Among the books there were also some containing bombast. They didn't try to portray Nature as it is within and outside of man; rather, they tried to make it more beautiful, seeking to elicit certain effects. I turned away from them. If reality isn't sacred to them, how are they capable of creating something more beautiful than God's Creation?

Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of timeless winter, of eternal winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside of our dailiness, the snow as nature's secret…we could lose the polar icecaps but would not stop hearing winter music.

Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.

A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an cabin, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.

The sign at Starbucks should read "Friends are like snowflakes: more different and beautiful each time you cross their path in our common descent." For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into every stranger and more complex patterns, until at las they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.

One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims' flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.

The experience of the world broadens with the reality of other creatures made vivid within it.

U re u re na-nam Gi re gi re na-nam Mu re mu re na-nam

Sometimes looking at the fulmar's gaping, mouth-opening, mutually frenzied, head-bobbing, nibbling, shout-laughing version of 'I love you/I hate you', which can begin calmly enough but then builds to a tumultuous, guffawing, totalizing climax, I have thought that only in the ecstatic moments of life can we come near to knowing the reality of a bird's mind.

It was at that moment that I came to the conclusion that there is some link between plants and loneliness.

Once I heard Dantly tell Welton that the Native Americans used to call that particular part of the morning "between the wolf and the dog" because the sky is so deep blue and spooky or whatever that you can't tell what's what. Is that a wolf on that hill or a dog? A man or a monkey? A saint or the devil?

Nature is not cruel, it is simply indifferent

Alas, we are no more or less evolved than any creature. Uniqueness is terribly overrated.

Evolution, blind and slow, has not inched along over billions of years with any intention that it should be decipherable to one or any of its billions of children.

Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it's a dumb, simplistic question.

As a species, all the things we do are unique, and are also seen all over the natural world.