Quotes About Nature

My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher's heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves.

Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected.

The afternoons were getting longer again, stretching. I stayed too long at a stoplight because the sunlight was so pretty, sifting through all the leaves on the sycamore trees lining Sierra Bonita, turning each a pale jade green. The jacaranda trees preparing for their burst of true lavender blue come May. Go, said Dad. Sorry, I said.

I wanted to marry wood. I wanted to chew down some two–by–fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz with luck.

People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one. When nature finally calls, they have no idea where to go and are in a mess.

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Every night, the TV news is like a nautre hike through the Book of Revelation.

Seeing the sky darken & the fields turn brown & the lake lead-grey as some enormous scrap of sheet metal & wind grabs the world around the equator I am most thankful then for knowing about the little gold hairs on your belly

See how small your are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger that you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our life is not the measure of all things: consider sublime places a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell.

I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw.

the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons...The news currently resists giving us the single most calming response one can offer to certain problems: evidence that they are normal and that they belong to a species which is intrinsically (rather than exceptionally) imperfect.

To define a mission for art, then, one of its tasks is to teach us to be good lovers: lovers of rivers and lovers of skies, lovers of motorways and lovers of stones (58). And – very importantly – somewhere along the way, lovers of people.

Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...

Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.

We need panels of gold and lapis, windows of coloured glass and gardens of immaculately raked gravel in order to stay true to the sincerest parts of ourselves.

Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will – unless one of them is eaten – be effectively bonded by what they have seen.

We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.

It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.