Best 6303 quotes in «nature quotes» category

I think these movements and become them, here, In this room's stillness, none of them about, And relish them all-until I think of where Thrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writes Quick V's and Q's in the dust and rubs them out. from "Movements

I thought that there could be no revolt against nature. I accepted the landscape without dreaming that, behind, there still prowled large skeletons without fur. With just one sign, I thought I was able to make them rise up outside their refuges...

I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.

I thought that you would be frozen in awe when you found the sequence, when you heard a bird's song repeating my Morse code, my cry for help, my S.O.S, when you saw the same numbers in the petals of a flower and the structure of a pine cone, when you saw with your own eyes the interconnectedness of all things. But I was wrong. You searched for a male god, a creator, an intelligent designer, or you banished the beauty and mystery of the world beneath the cold concrete grave of closed-eye skepticism. The few of you who could still hear my music felt tortured and misunderstood; you reached out for any conspiracy theory large enough to explain your alienated despair, your sense that the Earth was dying and no one cared. But listen to me -- you are not alone. Run your fingers through the grass and grab it in your fists, feel my pulse echoing through your blood. You. Are. Not. Alone. And I -- I am not dead yet.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

It is absolutely certain that we must act to protect nature much more efficiently than ever before. Tomorrow – when mankind will step forward to a totally uncertain future – will be too late.

It is a great mistake to say ”Conquer it,” for we can never conquer nature; we can only harmonize with it.

It is a flower's scent, not its size, that lures bees.

It is a blessed gift to witness the beauty of each day.

It is an undoubted truth that the neck and throat of a highbred woman are incomparably more beautiful than in the woman of lower origin. Blood will tell; there is no disputing it.

It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel in some degree as you do-who have not at least been given a taste for nature in early life. They lose a great deal.

It is because we feel that we are separate from nature that we also feel it is okay to manipulate it, pollute it, and cause it harm. We project our inner turmoil onto the planet, causing outer turmoil. Nearly all of the disasters of our time—war, famine, oppression, social injustice, environmental pollution, extinction—arise from this delusional belief that we have an existence independent of the world we live in. All of this misery, all of this destruction, all of this pain and suffering, is caused by our failure to realize that there is no separation and that really we are all one.

It is better to be an eagle for one day than to be a vulture for a lifetime.

It is better to be foolish than a dilettante.

...it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country.

It is clear from nature that everything goes through a cyclic phase

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own mumuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. .

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined..

It is impossible to enjoy divine protection without the word of God. You must be a word addict.

It is impossible, on a day like this, to tell sea from sky.

It is impossible to provide unlimited visitation and the essential qualities of an unconventional, non-urban experience simultaneously. Here too a compromise is called for: a willingness to trade quantity for quality of experience. There is nothing undemocratic or even unusual in such a trade. The notion that commitment to democratic principles compels the assumption of scarcity is one of the familiar misconceptions of our time. We need a willingness to value a certain kind of experience highly enough that we are prepared to have fewer opportunists for access in exchange for a different sort of experience when we do get access.

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance. If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use... If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer... Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

It is in vain to chase two birds at the same time, even if you have a thousand legs.

It is irrelevant whether or not there are other forms of life in the Galaxy or in other galaxies. The fact that we are here provides an 'existence proof as it is called in mathematics. To say that we are an accident of nature is to miss the point. The laws of nature are presumably eternal and immutable. They do not change in mid-stream and suddenly acquire the ability to create a pretty toy if circumstances arise.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.

It is love’s nature to be expressed.

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.

It is Nature that causes all movement. Deluded by the ego, the fool harbors the perception that says "I did it".

It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment. I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

It is not even governed by ‘nature’. It is simply a natural adjustment!

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...

It is not in our nature to judge each other but to love one another.

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.

It is not in my nature to be interested in the living. But there are many things, I have found, that defy nature.

It isn't just we humans and the big animals who have their own gods. The great things of this world--rivers, mountains, lakes, forests--have their own gods as well. The very large ones have more than one god. Old Zekoi is one, because the rivers and streams that come to him have their own gods. If you deal with one god--as you now have--you will see others. Treat them with respect if they come to you. Most will not say as much, but they are often called to battle against Uusoae, the Queen of Chaos. Our tribute, prayers, and respect give them strength to keep fighting, somehow.

It is one of the greatest Curses visited upon Mankind, he told me, that they shall fear where no Fear is: this astrological and superstitious Humour disarms men's Hearts, it breaks their Courage, it makes them help to bring such Calamities on themselves. Then he stopped short and looked at me, but my Measure was not yet fill'd up so I begg' d him to go on, go on. And he continued: First, they fancy that such ill Accidents must come to pass, and so they render themselves fit Subjects to be wrought upon; it is a Disgrace to the Reason and Honour of Mankind that every fantasticall Humourist can presume to interpret the Skies (here he grew Hot and put down his Dish) and to expound the Time and Seasons and Fates of Empires, assigning the Causes of Plagues and Fires to the Sins of Men or the Judgements of God. This weakens the Constancy of Humane Actions, and affects Men with Fears, Doubts, Irresolutions and Terrours. I was afraid of your Moving Picture, I said without thought, and that was why I left. It was only Clock-work, Nick. But what of the vast Machine of the World, in which Men move by Rote but in which nothing is free from Danger? Nature yields to the Froward and the Bold. It does not yield, it devours: You cannot master or manage Nature. But, Nick, our Age can at least take up the Rubbidge and lay the Foundacions: that is why we must study the principles of Nature, for they are our best Draught. No, sir, you must study the Humours and Natures of Men: they are corrupt, and therefore your best Guides to understand Corrupcion. The things of the Earth must be understood by the sentient Faculties, not by the Understanding. There was a Silence between us now until Sir Chris. says, Is your Boy in the Kitchin? I am mighty Hungry.

It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon.

It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer; the heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag our feet about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn.

It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature!

It is the nature of the circumstances to disperse. If there is attachment with the circumstance, there will be abhorrence when they get dispersed.

It is the kind of glassy night when sound travels miles across the surface of the sea; the air a crystal wineglass, susceptible to the slightest flick of a fingertip.

It is unfortunate that many people today cannot appreciate the value that every man possesses.

It is unfortunate that many people today cannot sense the worth in people.

It is unnatural to fear something natural.

It is weird to me on how people will come to church frequently and have absolutely no desire or intention to change anything about their life based on what they experienced in the church.

It is with eight lengthy legs we use to catch food, balance and knit a beautiful silk bed, but as babies we had lost our bones and skin, and hence our legs we had shed.

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

It may indeed be fantasy when I Essay to draw from all created things Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety. So let it be; and if the wide world rings In mock of this belief, it brings Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity. So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee, Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.