Quotes About Nature

Nature and nurture are inextricable; only scientists and psychologists could think otherwise, and we know all about them, don't we? --We should. We've watched them since they were tribal wizards, yelping around the campfire. ...

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.

It was plain that he had had a lot of training, for nobody ever sang so by the light of Nature.

Autumn nights are the most fickle: good and bad weather All in five days, and more than that in a month.

The people of a city blessed with all the good things nature has can grow smug about who they are, can find complacency in livability polls, as if we did a lot to deserve it.

Many grim tales stem from your green lands, and still deeds both noble and evil shall yet unfold there.

Is the Starwife a witch? asked Firgil. Is any wise female a witch? Just because they have been blessed by the Green and given strange and beautiful gifts, does not mean they use them for evil purposes.

Augustine explains that in the Manichaean system, this cross of light represents fragments of the divine nature that have become entrapped in human bodies or elsewhere in creation, particularly in vegetables or fruits. These fragments then feel acute pain when they are cut, cooked, chewed, or digested

Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.

Can't all beasts be tamed?

Cannot a Beast be tamed?

Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared to mice, robins are reserved.

The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.

I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself.

and again she wished for Sherwood, and the dappled roof of leaves that never weighed upon her. She pulled her scarf closer around her and thought, I would rather live in a hut in the woods; a hut like the one of my first memories, with a clean-swept dirt floor, and a brown-eyed boy watching me from behind his mother's skirts as I watched him from behind mine.

Not all honey— she had concluded— had a specific use beyond what all honey is good for, sweetness and salves. But this honey, it was somehow so strong that it must be for something, though she had still not learnt what it was. The best she had come to was that this honey was for joy...

The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.

It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered; it just is, like sunlight or mountains. It is for human beings to see the shadows behind the light, and the light behind the shadows. It is, perhaps, why dogs have people, and people have dogs.

the sheep] sidled up beside him and bumped him lovingly with its head. Val looked at it sadly. I am sorry, you ugly creature, he said. I have not used my magic in a long time, and I am very out of practice.

I'd learned to fish because Mel taught me, not because I longed to impale small invertebrates on barbed hooks and rip hell out of piscine oral cavities and smother fellow oxygen breathers in an alien medium

He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much.

When spring came I dug up the garden and planted it, and weeded it, and prayed over it, and fidgeted; and almost three years of lying fallow had agreed with it, because it produced radishes the size of onions, potatoes the size of melons, and melons the size of small sheep. The herb border ran wild, and the air smelled wonderful.

I will miss the horses, said Beauty a little wistfully. Perhaps you will become fond of the goat, said Jeweltongue. Or even the chickens. Does one ever grow fond of chickens? said Beauty dubiously. Perhaps the goat.