Nature Quotes

Quotes About Nature From Million Quotes

 

 

How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! - Emily Dickinson, letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper, 1880


I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. - John Muir (1838–1914)


What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn! - Logan Pearsall Smith


Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard. - Standing Bear


How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! - John Muir, The Mountains of California


Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. - Ralph Waldo Emerson


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. - George Washington Carver


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 own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. - John Muir, Our National Parks


God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars. - Author unknown, commonly attributed to Martin Luther


I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. - Henry David Thoreau


...And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings...
- William Wordsworth, lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 1798 July 13th


Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers — for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. - Osho


Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. - Khalil Gibran


I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982


I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup. - Wendell Berry


And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know? - Carl Sandburg, Good Morning America, 1928


I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. - e.e. cummings


The poetry of the earth is never dead. - John Keats


I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me — I am happy. - Hamlin Garland, McClure’s, February 1899


In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. - Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 1967 December 22nd


After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh


The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man. - Author Unknown


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. - Juvenal, Satires


There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
- George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage


You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. - Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964


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. - Galileo Galilei


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. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks — the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. — Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. - John Muir, The Yosemite


Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home –
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.
- Emily Dickinson, c.1862


Good heavens, of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons. - James Russell Lowell


Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. - Lao Tzu


As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens. - Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping


Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street. - William Blake


To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. - Helen Keller


Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. - Henry David Thoreau


Joy all creatures drink
At nature’s bosoms...
- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), “Ode to Joy,” translated from German


What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery


One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. - William Shakespeare


I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. - Frank Lloyd Wright


I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. - William Hazlitt (1778–1830)


To one who has been long in city pent,
’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
- John Keats, Sonnet XIV


Fieldes have eies and woods have eares. - John Heywood, 1565




You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather’d, wooded, river, or marine Nature generally. - Walt Whitman, “Birds—And a Caution,” Specimen Days


In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. - Aldo Leopold


A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant,” 1820


Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein


I’ve always regarded nature as the clothing of God. - Alan Hovhaness


Nature is new every morning. - Proverb


Nature is new every morning, but its cycles are ancient, independent of all our anxieties, oblivious to our plans. - Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, "Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer," 2003 September 25th


To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment. - Jane Austen


The reflection of the rays of the sun from living green, during a great part of the year, is highly salutary to the eyes, and through the medium of the eyes, to the rest of the system. - William Andrus Alcott (1798–1859), The Young Woman's Book of Health, 1850


Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests. - Thornton Wilder


And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. - William Shakespeare


Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you’ll find it there. - Robb Sagendorph


I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them.
I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them.
I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness.
I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees.
I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender.
I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.
- Muriel Strode, “Creation Songs”


Our downfall as a species is that we are arrogant enough to think that we can control Mother Nature and stupid enough to think it is our job. - Greg Peterson, 1997, www.urbanfarm.org


To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. - Mahatma Gandhi


A rhododendron bud lavender-tipped. Soon a glory of blooms to clash with the cardinals and gladden the hummingbirds! - Dave Beard


What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
- Gerard Hopkins


My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms — will it return to my body when they scatter? - Kotomichi


The tulip and the butterfly
Appear in gayer coats than I:
Let me be dressed fine as I will,
Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.
- Isaac Watts


Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods! - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, “Inspiration”


Nature is my medicine. - Sara Moss-Wolfe


Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. - Rachel Carson


I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. - Abraham Cowley


You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River? Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them. - Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978


What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid


That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe. - John Berger, The Sense of Sight, 1980


Happiness flutters in the air whilst we rest among the breaths of nature. - Kelly Sheaffer


He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees; he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the children, whose days played even like his hours— But men he avoided.... - Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography, translated from German by Charles T. Brooks, 1865


Adults are always so busy with the dull and dusty affairs of life which have nothing to do with grass, trees, and running streams. - The Little Grey Men by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), 1942


If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere. - Vincent Van Gogh


All I want is to stand in a field
and to smell green,
to taste air,
to feel the earth want me,
Without all this concrete
hating me.
- Phillip Pulfrey, from Love, Abstraction and other Speculations, www.originals.net


Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence. - Alfred Billings Street


There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon. - Alice Meynell


With innovation and technology, seems we have forgotten to cherish the true beauty the world has to offer. - A.C. Van Cherub, 2008


Over our manhood bend the skies;
Against our fallen and traitor lives
The great winds utter prophecies;
With our faint hearts the mountain strives,
Its arms outstretched, the druid wood
Waits with its benedicite
And to our age’s drowsy blood
Still shouts the inspiring sea.
- James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal





Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower. - Alan C. Kay


Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own Affairs than we. - Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience,” translated from French by Charles Cotton


Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and ’tis Injustice to infringe her Laws. - Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience,” translated from French by Charles Cotton


A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. - Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991


Nature will not be admired by proxy. - Winston Churchill


Nature inspires my everything. She inspires my solitude, and my writing and my art. She lifts me upon her welcoming wings and soars me through the sky of possibilities. She colors my day, brightens my soul, and calms my nights. She is fierce and beautiful, strong and delicate — an unrelenting Queen so generous of advice and never weary of new beginnings. In spring a colorful maiden, in winter a wise old lady, in autumn a looking-glass to my falling-leaf self, and summer a warm blossomed benefactor, comrade to the sun. A constant companion — sometimes indifferent, sometimes nuzzling me with her genial breezes and raining drops of heaven onto me. To close my windows and shut her out is error and melancholy. - Terri Guillemets


If you wish to know the divine, feel the wind on your face and the warm sun on your hand. - Buddha


The spiritual quality of earth: eternally pregnant and containing in its fertility the unwritten cipher of cosmic lore. - Frieda Harris


Say, care-worn man,
Whom Duty chains within the city walls,
Amid the toiling crowd, how grateful plays
The fresh wind o’er thy sickly brow, when free
To tread the springy turf,— to hear the trees
Communing with the gales,—to catch the voice
Of waters, gushing from their rocky womb,
And singing as they wander...
Spring-hours will come again, and feelings rise
With dewy freshness o’er thy wither’d heart.
- Robert Montgomery, “Beautiful Influences,” A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829


The great pulsation of nature beats too in my breast, and when I carol aloud, I am answered by a thousand-fold echo. I hear a thousand nightingales. Spring hath sent them to awaken Earth from her morning slumber, and Earth trembles with ecstasy, her flowers are hymns, which she sings in inspiration to the sun... - Heinrich Heine, "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855


God's handiwork is all about me,
As I sit on the porch and gaze
At the far-off peaks of the mountains
That are touched with the sun's bright rays.
- Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "In the Mountains" (1940s)


But when he had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like garden-walls behind each other,—when Nature opened all the pipes of the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and, flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,—then was Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling like the sun’s image in the infinite ocean....
Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and over the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and in it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.—
All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an immeasurable soul.
- Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography, translated from German by Charles T. Brooks, 1865


The dance of the palm trees, the oceans calling, the first rays of sun and heaven is here. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife


Innovative capitalists have tried to rewrite nature, but to no avail. - Terri Guillemets, 2007


I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. - John Burroughs





Any man that walks the mead
In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find
A meaning suited to his mind.
- Alfred Tennyson


What a type of happy family is the family of the sun! with what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent’s in at once upon him and on one another! - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
- William Wordsworth


Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. - Henry David Thoreau


...The woods, the lawns, the heaths supply
Lessons from Nature to the heart....
- Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), “The Horologe of the Fields”


The attraction of variety, contrast, is always invigorating. Nature does not for long allow a sameness of beauty to prevail. - Virginia Garland, "The Rain," Out West: A Magazine of the Old Pacific and the New, February 1908


The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic idols may be worshipped for a while; but at length they are overturned by the continual and silent progress of Truth, as the grim statues of Copan have been pushed from their pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined walls. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh: A Tale, 1849


Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise. - George Washington Carver


Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. - John Lubbock


There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough to pay attention to the story. - Linda Hogan


In nature answers are given quietly, in the details, just waiting for discovery. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife


...but when
The Spirit speaks,—or beauty from the sky
Descends into my being,—when I hear
The storm-hymns of the mighty ocean roll,
Or thunder sound,—the champion of the storm!—
Then I feel envy for immortal words,
The rush of living thought; oh! then I long
To dash my feelings into deathless verse,
That may administer to unborn time,
And tell some lofty soul how I have lived
A worshipper of Nature and of Thee!
- Robert Montgomery, “Death,” A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829


Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes — every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. - Orison Swett Marden





Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
- Rupert Brooke



Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Progress of Culture”


The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. - e.e. cummings


I walked barefoot — the only way to walk on a muddy road. - Laurie Gough, “Light on a Moonless Night”


A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with resignation, at the unconquerable unimplicated sun. - Llewelyn Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy





If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. - Eleonora Duse


It is surprising, in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools, how little we yet know of the common things around us.... It is no wonder that there is so little substantial enjoyment of Nature in the community, when we feed children on grammars and dictionaries only, and take no pains to train them to see that which is before their eyes. The mass of the community have "summered and wintered" the universe pretty regularly, one would think for a good many years; and yet nine persons out of ten in the town or city, and two out of three even in the country, seriously suppose, for instance, that the buds upon trees are formed in the spring; they have had them within sight all winter, and never seen them. - Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "April Days," first published 1861, quoted from the 1897 edition


Rain is my favorite color
Autumn's breath is too
Sunshine on the water
A sunset breeze's hue
The taste of freedom excites me
And the smell of love brand new
I touch your soul and feel its silk
Hear the silence and know it's true
- Terri Guillemets, 1988


Nature, in her blind search for life, has filled every possible cranny of the earth with some sort of fantastic creature. - Joseph Wood Krutch


God is an artist of Nature;
He paints in colors, so rare,
The bursting bud in the Springtime,
The lovely trees everywhere:
Autumn leaves so very gorgeous,
In colors of every hue,
The fleecy clouds, so pure and white,
That sail in the skies of blue.
- Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "God is an Artist of Nature" (1940s)


And in the development of these [mountains] Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea. Laboring harmoniously in united strength, they crushed and ground and wore away the rocks in their march, making vast beds of soil, and at the same time developed and fashioned the landscapes into the delightful variety of hill and dale and lordly mountain that mortals call beauty.... And our admiration must be excited again and again as we toil and study and learn that this vast job of rock-work, so far-reaching in its influences, was done by agents so fragile and small as are these flowers of the mountain clouds.... Thus and so on it has oftentimes seemed to me sang and planned and labored the hearty snow-flower crusaders; and nothing that I can write can possibly exaggerate the grandeur and beauty of their work. - John Muir, “The Sierra Nevada,” The Mountains of California


Each sunshine-moment twinkles by
A white-winged, wandering butterfly,
Through sky half golden and half blue,
With white-rose cloudlets rippling through.
A world of flowers is at our feet;
The soft wind's gladsome, warm, and sweet...
- W.T., "Honeymoon Cottage," Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts, 1862 June 28th


May your search through Nature lead you to yourself. - Author Unknown


I’m terribly sorry, but nature is not always family friendly. - Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo video game) written by Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka, and Toshihiro Kawabata


Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”


[A]nd now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful...
- Edward Thomas (1878-1917), “October”


Nature's beautiful dancers — flowers, water, leaves
Dancing to the music of God's sweet breeze.
- Terri Guillemets


Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. - Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620


Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!—ah, if he could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,—could have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods! - Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography, translated from German by Charles T. Brooks, 1865


Cherry summer cloud happy heart blossoms overgrowing my sunlit soul bursting into nature's freedom! - Terri Guillemets


Beneath our feet a fairy pathway flows,
The grass still glitters in the summer breeze,
The dusky wood, and distant copse appear,
And that lone stream, upon whose chequer’d face
We mused, when noon-rays made the pebbles gleam,
Is mirror’d to the mind: though all around
Be rattling hoofs and roaring wheels, the eye
Is wand’ring where the heart delights to dwell.
- Robert Montgomery, “Beautiful Influences,” A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829


All the uglinesses of the world can best be forgotten in the beauty of nature! - Mehmet Murat ildan


The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom. - Theodore Roosevelt


The birds that wake the morning, and those that love the shade;
The winds that sweep the mountain or lull the drowsy glade;
The Sun that from his amber bower rejoiceth on his way,
The Moon and Stars, their Master's name in silent pomp display.
- Reginald Heber (1783–1826), "Seventh Sunday After Trinity," Hymns, Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year  [The original version of this was a poem titled "Spring," published in 1816. This modified version was published posthumously in 1827 by his widow Amelia Heber. The wording of the two versions has quite a few variations. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


There is not a creature unacquainted with gratification, in some shape or another. All derive it from the circumstances amid which they exist, which fact quietly suggests to us that the purest and most lasting pleasures are to be found at our very feet,— that they are not necessarily the fruit of toil and outlay, but that they flow to us out of the very nature of things, if we will but be content with what is simple and genuine.... The foot that is familiar with the grass belongs usually to a man of lighter heart than he whose soles seldom wander from the pavement; and the best elixir vitæ is a run, as often as we can contrive it, amid the sweets of new and lovely scenery, where nature sits, fresh from the hand of the Creator, almost chiding us for our delay. - Leo Hartley Grindon, “Insects,” The Little Things of Nature: Considered Especially in Relation to the Divine Benevolence, 1865


Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price. - Napoleon Hill


I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers...
- Robert Herrick


Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. - Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)  [However, as beautiful as is his description of sweet Nature in this piece, "He asked too much, both from Nature and from himself.... Nature could only harbour for a moment this liver in great cities who had told her that her use was to illustrate quotations from the poets, and had said that he preferred to have her captive on his walls in the canvases of Corot and Constable, than to live in her cruder landscapes. He had never intended to make too elaborate an advance to her.... He knew that reading Baudelaire in a café would be more natural to him than an agricultural existence. He was determined, however, not to return to the extravagances of his life before prison, and he hoped that the country would help him keep his resolve." - Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study, 1912 —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me. - John Fowles


Sunshine has no budget, the sea no red tape. - Terri Guillemets


[H]e ran, he stopped—he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring. - Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography, translated from German by Charles T. Brooks, 1865


I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite. - Bertrand Russell


...How sublime
Upon a time-blanch’d cliff to muse, and, while
The eagle glories in a sea of air,
To mingle with the scene around!—Survey
The sun-warm heaven...
- Robert Montgomery, “Beautiful Influences,” A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829


And after half a mile’s ride through a beautiful grove, they emerged into a little clearing, which seemed to Bessie’s astonished eyes like a patch of beauty dropped from heaven. In the centre stood a small log house, so overrun with clinging vines that it seemed at first but a green and flowery mound. To the south of it a little garden stretched away in natural terraces; on the east a small, but luxuriant fruit orchard reared its graceful young trees, whose branches even thus early in the season hung low with their promise of gold and crimson harvest. To the west a meadow, soft and mossy as an English lawn, sloped down to a silvery brook, whose birthplace was in the rocky hill, a little to the north, down whose steep bank its pure waters came leaping and singing, with bright rainbows sparkling ever about its fairy pathway. Back of the rustic lodge, a cool, dim, but magnificent forest stretched away till its long aisles met the feet of hoary mountains which completely shut in the little nook from the great world beyond. - Mrs. Caroline A. Soule, “The Tory’s Niece,” c.1858


How many stanzas in the springtime breeze?
How plenty the raindrops? As He doth please.
There is no meter and there is no rhyme,
Yet God’s poems always read in perfect time.
- Terri Guillemets


Truly it may be said that the outside of a mountain is good for the inside of a man. - George Wherry, Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot, 1896


Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. - Henry David Thoreau, journal, 1856 January 5th


Mother Nature is the ultimate truth of the show must go on. - Terri Guillemets


The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven. - William Channing


Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back. - Gwyn Thomas


The world is a sunny success. - Terri Guillemets


If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature’s way. - Aristotle


A wee child toddling in a wonder world.... I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan. - Zitkala-Sa


One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
- William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” 1798


You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. - St. Bernard


And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It


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. - John Burroughs


Nature is the art of God. - Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635


The color of the mountains is Buddha’s body; the sound of running water is his great speech. - Dōgen


The moon quotes the sun, the rivers quote the trees, and trees quote the breeze. - Terri Guillemets


Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Nature never goes out of style. - Anonymous


I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. - Walt Whitman


I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn. - W.H. Hudson, The Book of a Naturalist, 1919


We say of the oak, "How grand of girth!"
Of the willow we say, "How slender!"
And yet to the soft grass, clothing earth,
How slight is the praise we render!...
Each year her buttercups nod and drowse,
With sun and dew brimming over;
Each year she pleases the greedy cows
With oceans of honeyed clover...
- Edgar Fawcett (1847–1904), "Grass" (c.1877), Songs of Doubt and Dream  #grassfed


There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me. - Thomas Jefferson


Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it’s like that, then I want out. - Steven Weinberg


The trees do not license themselves to the countryside. The bees don't invoice the flowers. There is no committee of oceans, and I've never seen a bird take out nest owner's insurance. - Terri Guillemets


To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring — these are some of the rewards of the simple life. - John Burroughs