Nature Quotes
Most popular nature quotes
There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural must be good. Strychnine is natural.
If, as a chemist, I see a flower, I know all that is involved in synthesizing a flower's elements. And I know that even the fact that it exists is not something that is natural. It is a miracle.
Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself and its seed.
Even the gods dwelt in the woods.
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
We cannot command nature except by obeying her.
Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
The morning's the size of heaven. What will you do without it?
In all the examples Nature means what happens 'of itself' or 'of its own accord': what you do not need to labour for; what you will get if you take no measures to stop it.
Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf.
Nature is the art of God.
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
Nature does not proceed by leaps.
Our ideas must be as broad as nature if they are to interpret nature.
It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.
Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Holy is the forest. Holy is that place where the senses are at peace.
Often we feel we must have infuriated nature and it has responded by bringing havoc upon our communities. I think it is unwise to personalize nature. I think when we don't know what to do it's wise to do nothing. Sit down quietly; quiet our hearts and minds and breathe deeply.
Really we create nothing. We merely plagiarize nature.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Our Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them unless we were meant to be immortal.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like falling leaves.
There is no silence like that of the mountains.
I have seen the sea when it is stormy and wild; when it is quiet and serene; when it is dark and moody. And in all its moods, I see myself.
April hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.
When there is a river in your growing up, you probably always hear it.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence. It may be a theatrical "encore."
Everybody wants to go back to nature—but not on foot.
Never a daisy grows but a mystery guides the growing.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
Since the beginning each generation has fought nature. Now, in the life-span of a single generation, we must turn around 180 degrees and become the protector of nature.
Around us, life bursts forth with miracles — a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life's daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.
When you are looking at a sunset and are in contact with the beauty of nature, practice mindful breathing.... Getting in touch with the beauty of nature makes life much more beautiful, much more real, and the more mindful and concentrated you are, the more deeply the sunset will reveal itself to you.
Nature does nothing uselessly.
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, the more the danger increases and the heart shrinks.
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
Look at those cows and remember that the greatest scientists in the world have never discovered how to make grass into milk.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
What nature requires (is essential) is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.
To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.
Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.
Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.
Nature gave men two ends - one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most.
But perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster.
Individuality seems to be nature's whole aim-and she cares nothing for individuals.
In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad; hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
To me the outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.
Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
It is far from easy to determine whether nature has proved to man a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.
The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d'être, is to defend us against nature.
Nature works on a method of all for each and each for all.
It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable.
Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out the balance also the lives of men.
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.
The laws of nature are the same everywhere. Whoever violates them must always pay the penalty.
A RAIN DROP With what adroitness Nature gleans sublime effects with modest means! A rain-drop streaks my window pane; then it is spring-time once again.
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.
However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
Nature distributes her favors unequally. To some of her creatures she gives intelligence, to others beauty.
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.
The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, One is nearer God's Heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth.
Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune Him in.
Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God.
You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.
Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
There are no vacant lots in nature.
There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.
Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.
Life is ruthless. Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, "I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway."
Nature is a labyrinth in which the very haste you move with, will make you lose your way.
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
Nature never breaks her own laws.
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
I always think of Nature as a great spectacle, something like the opera.
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.
Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster.
Natures abhors the old and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with out understandings and our hearts.
If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her.
If you have got a living force and you're not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot.
That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
It is far from easy to determine whether she has proved to man a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.
Nature is the common, universal language, understood by all.
Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language.
Art speaks only to the mind, whereas nature speaks to all the faculties.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails.
I am called a mother, but I am a grave.
Nature is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd, I swear to you there ate divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.
Nature never did betray The heart that loved her.
Blizzards, floods, volcanos [sic], hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us.
A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things—including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands except man, who has found ways of ignoring them.
After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.
Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout the false refinements that would keep her out.
For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.
Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.
We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
When a man says to me, 'I have the intensest love of nature', at once I know that he has none.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly—or ever—gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.
A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.
A tree that affords thee shade, do not order it to be cut down.
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.
He who keeps the hills, burns the wood; he who keeps the streams drinks the water.
He who thinks everything must be in bloom when the strawberries are in bloom doesn't know anything about apples.
How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us. Stay close to the heart of nature and forget this troubled world. Remember, there is nothing wrong with nature; the trouble is in ourselves.
I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.
In the range of inorganic nature, I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.
In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.
Nature cares nothing for our logic, our human logic; she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crunched under its wheel.
Nature goes on her way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.
Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit; a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master—the root, the branch, the fruits—the principles, the consequences.
Nature is a labyrinth in which the very haste you move with will make you lose your way.
Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.
Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.
Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
Nature often lets us down when we most need her; let us turn to art.
Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts: the sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above, seem to impart a quiet to the mind.
The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, grave, and severe; it is always in the light, and the faults and errors fall to our share. It defies incompetency, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear into that which produced thee. This, too, nature wills. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature and end thy journey in content, just as the olive falls when it is ripe, thanking the tree on which it grew and blessing the nature that gave it birth.
We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self- adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
Nature will never take direction from us no matter how much havoc we create in the attempt.
We are so obsessed with the nature of the economy that we ignore the economy of nature.
What is nature but a resource to be exploited by the most fortunate among us as they see fit. Why nothing, of course, in the minds of most.
Nature never spoils your vacation by letting you know when it ends. Nature has no Sunday night, no Monday morning, and no back-to-school dates.
