Quotes about Nature

To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away.  Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. ... You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel.  You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire.  Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.

Who are you, Nature?
I live in you;
for fifty years I have been seeking you,
and I have not found you yet.

Truth is the discipline of the ascetic, the quest of the mystic, the faith of the simple, the ransom of the weak, the standard of the righteous, the doctrine of the meek, and the challenge of Nature.  Together, all these constitute the Law of the universe.

The inapprehensible motion of life escapes our daily awareness, as does the tune of the cosmic dust that orders us all in one great dance of life.  We do not hear it playing until we come to a point where our ordinary and subtle senses are aligned together.  Then we come into harmony and awareness of both worlds at once, the apparent and the unseen worlds in conscious communion within us.  These privileged moments cannot be sought; they come unbidden, surprising us into mystical vision.  It may be that when we interrupt a walk on a high place at evening to admire the view, we apprehend the revolution of the earth as a physical motion beneath our feet; it may be that we become aware of a rhythm that weaves about the steady beating of our own heart as if it were a partner in a dance.

The resonances to which we respond and the relationship between ourselves and the music of life give us the only clues available about the nature of the invisible partner - clues reassuring enough that we can trust the source of our music.

dada is direct like nature and like nature wants to give its essential place to each thing. dada is moral the way nature is. dada represents an infinite sense and finite means.

"If we do not see the beauty of God in this life then we will never see it in the next life.  We must see the glory of God in the smallest flower."

Gerontissa Makrina (+ 1995)

There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall .... Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into  it .... as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.

Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. 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.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in "creation's dawn." The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.

We all flow from one fountain— Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.