Quotes About Nature

War is to men as maternity is to women.

Spring is God's way of saying 'One more Time

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stoodBy a dirt road, in first dark, and heardThe great geese hoot northward.I could not see them, there being no moonAnd the stars sparse. I heard them.I did not know what was happening in my heart.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned.

Walter Ralegh's "Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk" (p. 100):

Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice. The Nature of Emotions (2001)

Soul and habitat--we are finally in a position to know this--are correlates of one another.

And nothing . . . disquiets a rationalist more than a forest.

The destructive impulse with respect to nature all too often has psychological causes that go beyond the greed for material resource or the need to domesticate an environment. There is too often a deliberate rage and vengefulness at work in the assault on nature and its species, as if one would project onto the natural world the intolerable anxieties of finitude which hold humanity hostage to death.

The forests were foris, 'outside.' In them lived the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the paquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, wild men. Where else could they go? Outside of the law and human society one was in the forest. But the forest's asylum was unspeakable. One could not remain human in the forest; one could only rise above or sink below the human level.

we two clinging to twigs of each other in the tide amazed our identities survive

Everyone misbehaves,' said Eddie. 'That's nature. Everyone gets away with as much as they can get away with. And the more they can get away with, the more they will.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.

Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story—and maybe something of a poem. Anyway, as you possibly remember, there are these lines in front of the story: And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose . . . These words are now part of the story.

Sometimes we do hear water talking. In listening to the river a kind of silence prevails, broken only by the rush of water over rocks. Such a silence is more like faint echoes, each a series of dim reverberations. They continue inside you, distant, yet familiar. The language of the river…

To understand Africa you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we civilised people have encountered in two centuries

From a strictly Darwinian standpoint flowers would seem a needless extravagance. Evidently the Life Force has no use for Darwin or Darwinism. The Life Force is an artist.

Doing what comes naturally was (and is) no longer the appropriate response in many circumstances that arose in what had become an unnatural environment. It became the major social role of religion to bridge the gap between a human nature developed for one environment and the altered environment in which that nature now had to operate. People had to be persuaded to act unnaturally, as Jesus and other religious prophets would preach.

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.

Mother's milk, time-tested for millions of years, is the best nutrient for babies because it is nature's perfect food.

Mother Nature, mothers, grandmothers - yes, even fathers, and grandfathers - are the best doctors around, because they do not share the typical doctor's compulsion to interfere with the body's efforts and ability to heal itself.