Quotes About Nature

No sir," Dunwoody snapped. "It cannot be; no cyclone ever can move from Florida to Galveston.

Camille's rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.

These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.

my heart leapt like a young salmon.

the first officer, it seemed as if the ship were caught at the convergence of two storms, a gale from the north and a hurricane from the east, that together produced a tornado. Menard agreed.

gin daisy, which

I was born with the devil in me," he wrote. "I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God's province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent.

Monday was an apple-crisp day with temperatures that never exceeded sixty-two degrees, under vivid cerulean skies.

Ah, the cows..

Suzanne glanced over at her, eyebrow raised. "Is there an anaconda?" she asked, like it had suddenly occurred to her she could be totally wrong. Tamara should only be so lucky. "No, there's no anaconda, I can promise you that." Not even a garden snake.

I was thinking how bizarre it is that a parasite is growing in you and will eventually explode from your body through an extremely narrow opening, and yet you will both survive.

The checkerboarded fields of the Imperial Valley were refreshingly green with irrigated crops. Then the highline canal stretched like a huge snake below the plane and immediately the desert took over. It was as abrupt as that. Below the highline canal irrigation had turned the desert into a rich, fertile area. On the other side of the canal there was nothing but sand and a long straight ribbon of paved highway.

A few hundred feet below the car, jumping from foam-flecked rocks to dark, cool pools, a mountain stream churned over boulders, laughed back the sunlight in sparkling reflections, filled the canyon with the sound of tumbling water.

We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.

Man must always imagine and believe in a second reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.

Man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature... Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms

In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.

For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his essence, something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

Nature seems to have built into organisms an innate healthy-mindedness; it expresses itself in self-delight, in the pleasure of unfolding one's capacities into the world, in the incorporation of things in that world, and in feeding on its limitless experiences.

We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is "tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue.

Even a mole may instruct a philosopher in the art of digging.

People were to be happy not to the extent they dominated their fellow creatures on the earth, but to the extent they lived in balance with them

But what matters most is the aspiration to live in balance with nature, walk lightly on the land, treat the earth as a mother. No surprise that to such a morality most industrial processes, work schedules, and products are suspect!