Nature Quotes - Page 13

• Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Order, Goes On

  "Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret".

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

  George Eliot

  Real, Reading, Opposites

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.113, Wordsworth Editions

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.

  John Burroughs

  Mother, Religious, Heart

  John Burroughs, Charlotte Zoë Walker (2001). “The Art of Seeing Things: Essays”, p.223, Syracuse University Press

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Beauty, Beautiful

  1841 Essays: First Series,'Art'.

  92 Copy quote

  Show source

• The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Life, World, Fellowship

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Lord of the Rings: One Volume”, p.69, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Marry an outdoors woman. Then if you throw her out into the yard on a cold night, she can still survive.

  W. C. Fields

  Night, Yards, Camping

  21 Copy quote

• What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Inspiring, Peace

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  70 Copy quote

  Show source

• Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Art, Men, Names

  Edgar Allan Poe (1980). “The Unknown Poe: An Anthology of Fugitive Writings”, p.51, City Lights Books

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• In summer, the song sings itself.

  William Carlos Williams

  Summer, Song, Summertime

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.349, New Directions Publishing

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof.

  Elizabeth I

  Ocean, Science, Air

  24 Copy quote

• Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Rain, Adventure, Cutting

  Henry Ward Beecher (1862). “Eyes and ears”, p.49

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Thinking, People, Enemy

  9 Copy quote

• Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Beauty, Pain, Intelligence

  22 Copy quote

• Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking.

  Wangari Maathai

  Talking, Water, Tree

  Wangari Maathai's speech at Goldman Awards in San Francisco, April 24, 2006.

  49 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nature always springs to the surface and manages to show what she is. It is vain to stop or try to drive her back. She breaks through every obstacle, pushes forward, and at last makes for herself a way.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Spring, Break Through, Trying

  12 Copy quote

• The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Method

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2004). “A Dream Too Wild: Emerson Meditations for Every Day of the Year”, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.

  Ronald Wright

  Civilization, Interest, Ifs

  Ronald Wright (2010). “A Short History Of Progress”, p.129, Canongate Books

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bear in mind that the children of life are the children of joy; that the lower animals are only unhappy when made so by man; that man alone of all the creatures, has "found out many inventions", the chief of which appears to be the art of making himself miserable, and of seeing all Nature stained with that dark and hateful colour.

  William Henry Hudson

  Life, Art, Children

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Running, Retirement

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 2, sc. 1, l. 12

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
  The brooks for the fishers of song;
  To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
  The streams and the woods belong.

  Sam Walter Foss

  Dream, Song, Animal

  20 Copy quote

• I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Change, Garden, Growth

  10 Copy quote

• Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Years, Mushrooms

  Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.80, Univ of California Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Out of the long list of nature’s gifts to man, none is perhaps so utterly essential to human life as soil.

  Hugh Hammond Bennett

  Life, Men, Long

  38 Copy quote

• The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

  William Blake

  Moving, Eye, Men

  William Blake (1977). “The Portable William Blake”, p.136, Penguin

  180 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
  For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
  America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
  And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

  George Carlin

  Beautiful, Song, Men

  "Class Clown". Comedy album by George Carlin, 1972.

  38 Copy quote

  Show source