Nature

Quotes regarding nature:

• "Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same." –-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• "Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative." - H.G. Wells (1866-1946), Mind at the End of Its Tether, 1945

• "A flower is an educated weed." - Luther Burbank

• "All nature wears one universal grin." - Henry Fielding (1707-1754), 'Tom Thumb the Great, 1730.

• "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." –-John Muir (1838-1914)

• "Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher." - William Wordsworth (1770-1850), The Tables Turned, 1798

• "Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown." –-Humphry Davy (1778-1829), 30.11.1825

• "How Strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!" - Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886), Letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper.

• "I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature -– a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation." ~Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Prologue (In: Bully for Brontosaurus), 1991

• "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." - Aristotle (B.C. 384–322)

• "In the landscape of spring, there is neither better nor worse. The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short." --Zen saying

• "It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Emile, 1762

• "Laws Change; people die; the land remains." - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), quoted in Peter Blake's God's Own Junkyard, 1964

• "Leave it as it is . . . The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." - Theodore Roosevelt

• "Look abroad through Nature's range,

Nature's mighty law is change." –-Robert Burns (1759-1796), Let not woman e'er complain, 1794

• "Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments." - Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), The Notch of the White Mountains, 1868.

• Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit.
  • You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.
  • Horace (65-8 BC), Epistles I.X.24

• "Nature answers only when she is questioned." --Jacob Henle (1809-1885)

• "Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849

• "Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty." - John Ruskin, (1819-1900)

• "Nature never did betray
  

The Heart that Loved her."

- William Wordsworth, (1770-1850), Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey 1798.

• "Nature provides exceptions to every rule." - Margaret Fuller, The Dial, July 1843.

• "Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep." –-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• "Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites." - William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Adminstrator, (1970-1973 and 1983-1985), Business Week, June 18, 1990.

• "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 (1837-1921)

• "One Touch of nature makes the whole world kin." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Troilus and Cressida

• "Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?" –-Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Tires to sandals (In: Eight little piggies), 1993

• "Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you." - Frank Lloyd Wright

• Calvin: "That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let's go watch TV." –-Bill Watterson, Something under the bed is drooling, 1988

• "The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal." - Rene J. Dubos, (1901-1982), The Wooing of the Earth, 1980.

• "The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated." - Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Saturday Review, June 8, 1963

• "The moment one give close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." --Henry Miller

• "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 (1757-1827)

• "The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves)." –-Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Prologue (In: Bully for Brontosaurus), 1991

• "The Wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit." - Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Today and All Its Yesterdays, 1958.

• "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts." - Rachel Carson

• "To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from." - Terry Tempest Williams, testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Forest & Public Lands Management regarding the Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995. Washington, D.C. July 13, 1995.

• "Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge." - Thomas Edison

• "We cannot command nature except by obeying her." –-Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." --Navajo Proverb

• "We have all come from dots and Nature joins them up." - Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." --Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)

• "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." –-John Muir (1838-1914)

• "Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit." - Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

• "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things." ~Mary Oliver

Nature and Religion

• "Because God created the Natural – invented it out of His love and artistry – it demands our reverence." - C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), God in the Dock, 1948

• "It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world — Nature — is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it." - Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

• "Nature is infallible and is the voice of God, with this difference, that the language of the Holy Scripture can and should be interpreted in many ways (otherwise it would say many things contrary to the evidence of the senses), but the language of Nature is always the same, without metaphor, without allegory, without hyperbole, without doubtful, obscure, mysterious meanings. Nature speaks clearly to him who knows how to understand her, and has no need of interpretation." [original Italian or French] –-Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730), letter to Louis Bourguet, 30 August, 1721

• "Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), The Open Secret

• "Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of mankind." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

• "Green is Nature's favourite colour." Poems - Graham D Priest (1939- )