Best 6303 quotes in «nature quotes» category

To him whom contemplates a trait of natural beauty, no harm nor despair can come. The doctrines of despair, spiritual or political servitude, were never taught by those who shared the serenity of Nature. For each phase of Nature, though not invisible, is yet not too distinct or obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not too demanding of our attention.

To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Tolerance, a term which we sometimes use in place of the words respect, mercy, generosity, or forbearance, is the most essential element of moral systems; it is a very important source of spiritual discipline and a celestial virtue of perfected people.

To look at any thing, If you would know that thing, You must look at it long.

To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.

To Nature the dweller in the Nile valley linked all that was dear to him: his happiest fetes, poetry, and love - all were bound up with the garden and its products, especially flowers. Few Oriental nations can think of a festival without flowers, but nowhere are they so completely a part of human life, and so essential, as in [Ancient] Egypt.

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.

Tonight, the moon came out, it was nearly full. Way down here on earth, I could feel it's pull. The weight of gravity or just the lure of life, Made me want to leave my only home tonight. I'm just wondering how we know where we belong Is it in the arc of the moon, leaving shadows on the lawn In the path of fireflies and a single bird at dawn Singing in between here and gone

To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

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.

To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.

To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

To see her is to love her, And love but her forever; For nature made her what she is, And never made anither!

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

To see is one of God's great gifts to man and to comprehend what we see is doubly so. Furthermore, He has endowed some people with the qualities to see the beauties of life and nature much more than others and they have the greatest gift of all.

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

To speak of this subject you must... explain the nature of the resistance of the air, in the second the anatomy of the bird and its wings, in the third the method of working the wings in their various movements, in the fourth the power of the wings and the tail when the wings are not being moved and when the wind is favourable to serve as guide in various movements.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.

To the extent that we hyper-separate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually in order to justify domination, we not only lose the ability to empathise and to see the non-human sphere in ethical terms, but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory sense of autonomy. The failure to see the non-human domain in the richer terms appropriate to ethics licences supposedly ‘purely instrumental’ relationships that distort our perceptions and enframings, impoverish our relations and make us insensitive to dependencies and interconnections

To the birds and trees he talks: Caesar of his leafy Rome, There the poet is at home.

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.

To the natural philosopher, there is no natural object unimportant or trifling. From the least of Nature's works he may learn the greatest lessons.

To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.

To the mind which looks not to general results in the economy of Nature, the earth may seem to present a scene of perpetual warfare, and incessant carnage: but the more enlarged view, while it regards individuals in their conjoint relations to the general benefit of their own species, and that of other species with which they are associated in the great family of Nature, resolves each apparent case of individual evil, into an example of subserviency to universal good.

To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

To the solid ground Of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye.

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Trees and flowers were often more meaningful to me than people. They always helped me, consoled me, giving the soul a chance to believe once more than the world was beautiful and sensible, that the mad absurdities and cruelties of men were against the laws of Nature and the Universal Mind; that sooner or later violence would suffer utter defeat on this Earth. No words collected in books were more effectively convincing to me than foliage, clouds, rippling waters, rain.

Trees are your best antiques

True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.

True sport is always a duel, a duel with nature, with one's own fear, with one's own fatigue, a duel in which the body and the mind are strengthened.

True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.

True zazen is surrendering every moment. But surrendering to what? It really does not matter what we call it: God or the Tao or the Dharma or the Buddha or our true nature. . . . It is the act of letting go, of surrendering, that matters. The very act of letting go opens us up completely.

Trust life, even if you cannot trust people. For human nature is unreliable, but life itself is ruled by immutable law. Right action leads always, in the end, to victory.

Trusting your intuition is like learning to ride a bike. Everything takes practice before it becomes second nature.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.

Twilight - a time of pause when nature changes her guard. All living things would fade and die from too much light or too much dark, if twilight were not.

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Unless we are willing to encourage our children to reconnect with and appreciate the natural world, we can't expect them to help protect and care for it.

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.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

Unless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don't practice nonsense.

Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;.