Quotes About Nature

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.

Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska.

My father, whose work I adore... was down working on little things of grass and dead birds. Well, that didn't interest me. As an 8-year-old kid, I wanted knights in armor and so forth.

He gave us the lakes for our Northern boundary, and the rivers stretching to the seas upon whose waters floats our commerce to the nations of the world; while man has done all that can be done by science to bind us together.

It should seem, then, that the nature of society dictates another, a higher branch, whose superiority arises from its being the interested and natural conservator of the universal interest.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

I personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

If you want to know why the coast is such an inspirational place, ask Herman Melville, Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad. It's a glimpse of eternity. It invites rumination, the relentless whisper of the tide against the shore.

Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.

We live in a very chaotic world that sometimes we - it just seems like a mess. One of the reasons why we listen to music, and to great classical music in particular, is that everything is in an order and in a place and has a beauty that you see in nature, that you see and that people look for when they look for God.

I think I've got a real love thing going. I love people, I love life, and I love nature, and I can't see why other people can't be like that.

Here in the United States, corporations has human rights. And then why not - why not nature also, if corporations can defend themselves, saying, 'We have human rights?' Well, let's admit that nature also should be protected.

Why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?

Still, to this day, I can't run on the treadmill. Why not just run outside? I never understood it.

There's diversity in nature, so why not the media?

Why not share with the world the way it is and tell them my feelings about my cat, and how I played with my kids, and how addicted to Christmas time I am, and the smell of pine needles and hearing my kids laugh.

It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked.

To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.

The world is wide. No two days are alike, nor even two hours, neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other.