1022 Quotes Tagged: nature

Men argue. Nature acts.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.

It is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings; the noble form of the forest aisles, and the subdued light which penetrates their entangled boughs, combine to add to the impression; and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species.

omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum

(all the creatures of the world / as a book and a picture / are to us a mirror)

Il me semble que sous les ombrages d'une forêt je suis oublié, libre et paisible comme si je n'avais plus d'ennemis.

For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

Here I could stay tethered forever with just bread and water, nor would I be lonely; loved friends and neighbors, as love for everything increased, would seem all the nearer however many the miles and mountains between us.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now. Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.

This is the way in which he (poet) did his work. He used to go out with a pencil and a tablet and note what struck him...and make a picture out of it...But Nature does not allow an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil behind, and gone forth in a meditative spirit; and, on a later day, he should have embodied in verse not all that he had noted but what he best remembered of the scene; and he would have then presented us with its soul, and not with the mere visual aspect of it.