Quotes About Nature

Burke, unlike the Mill of On Liberty, had a true understanding of the nature of men, and balanced liberty with restraint and order, which are, in truth, essential to the preservation of liberty.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Concerns about relative position are a hard fact of human nature. No biologist is surprised that they loom so large in human psychology, since relative position was always by far the best predictor of reproductive success. People who didn't care how well they were doing in relative terms would have been ill-equipped for the competitive environments in which we evolved. Few parents, on reflection, would want their children to be stripped of positional concerns completely.

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

After Goethe" In all the mountains, Stillness; In the treetops Not a breath of wind. The birds are silent in the woods. Just wait: soon enough You will be quiet too.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter (Creation, Preservation, Destruction, Quiescence).

All things in the sun are sun.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ? Robert Hass, from "Meditation at Lagunitas," Praise ( ? Ecco, July 10, 1999)

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

August is dust here. Drought stuns the road, but juice gathers in the berries.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: "I think I shall praise it."

It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,/rising.

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.

I am always sorry for the Puritan, for he guided his life against desire and against nature. He found what he thought was comfort, for he believed the spirit's safety was in negation, but he has never given the world one minute's joy or produced one symbol of the beautiful order of nature. He sought peace in bondage and his spirit became a prisoner.

Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It's a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art , but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

Art need not be intended. It comes inevitably as the tree from the root, the branch from the trunk, the blossom from the twig. None of these forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation. He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.

Her pretty feet, like snails, did creepA little out, and then,As if they played at bo-peep,Did soon draw in again.

When a daffodil I see,Hanging down his head t'wards me,Guess I may what I must be:First, I shall decline my head;Secondly, I shall be dead;Lastly, safely buryed.

But ne'er the rose without the thorn.

Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and seeThe dew bespangling herb and tree.