Best 6303 quotes in «nature quotes» category

The thorns thinned out and the trees grew taller and straighter, their branches not beginning until a few feet over our heads. The white, peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold.

The tiniest mite has an inner life of which we can know nothing.

The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings.

The time I spent in the jungles held unalloyed happiness for me, and that happiness I would now gladly share. My happiness, I believe, resulted from the fact that all wildlife is happy in its natural surroundings. In nature there is no sorrow, and no repining. A bird from a flock, or an animal from a herd, is taken by hawk or carnivorous beast and those that are left rejoice that their time had not come today, and have no thought of tomorrow.

The town itself is disagreeable; but then, all around, you find an inexpressible beauty of nature.

The trail was designed to have no end, a wild place on which to be comfortably lost for as long as one desired. In those early days nobody fathomed walking the thing from beginning to end in one go. Section hikes, yes. Day hikes, too. But losing yourself for five months, measuring your body against the earth, fingering the edge of mental and physical endurance, wasn’t the point. The trail was to be considered in sections, like a cow is divided into cuts of beef. Even if you sample every slice, to eat the entire beast in a single sitting was not the point. Before 1948, it wasn’t even considered possible.

The tree in the field is to be treated with respect. It is not to be romanticized as the old lady romanticizes her cat (that is, she reads human reactions into it). . . . But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize that God made it and it deserves respect because he made it as a tree. Christians who do not believe in the complete evolutionary scale have reason to respect nature as the total evolutionist never can, because we believe that God made these things specifically in their own areas. So if we are going to argue against evolutionists intellectually, we should show the results of our beliefs in our attitudes. The Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing on a high level of respect.

The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.

The trees were his chapel and the hillsides his cathedral.

The trees are a thousand times taller than me, and hundreds of years older, and the rocks and leaves and plants and animals never do anything silly like kill each other or fall in love or grow up.

The trees were dappling again. They loved to dapple, it seemed to be their favorite pastime.

The trees were tinted exquisitely to an uncertain glory as the great red sinking sun flashed its rays on their crystal mantle. The vale of Aylesbury was drowsing beneath a slowly deepening shroud of mist. Above it the hills, their crests rounded and shaded by silver and rose coppices, seemed to have set in them great smoky eyes of flame where the last rays burned in them. 'It is like some dream world,' thought Mr. Cort. 'It is curious how, wherever the sun strikes, it seems to make an eye, and each one fixed on me; those hills, even those windows. But, judging from that mist, I shall have a slow journey home... ("Blind Man's Bluff")

The tree birds fill the air With their song And the roses intoxicate the rivers With their fragrance And From the lonely spot Where I stand I hear all the nature calling Your name And The feeling of being two -is tasted as one.

The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.

The true walker may not ask much from his pastime; but he is often surprise at the richness of the gifts which he receives. What he desires when he starts upon his walk he seldom contemplates, yet the heart yearns for a renewal of some experience, although he would not think of giving it utterance. It is with the open mind and heart that he sets out to receive whatever phantasies may come his way, hoping at the back of his mind, it may be, that some measure at least of the fuller revelation of the wonderful and mysterious in nature may come within the power of his assimilation, and lured on in the hope that answers may come to his questionings, in the spirit of the wind upon the hill-tops and in the solitude of sequestered vales; and returning with the wealth of a quiet mind and a peaceful heart, and a certain assurance that holds within it sufficient longing to send him forth again when the time arrives

The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

The truth of the stars reflects through all of us.

The truth is, there is good and bad in everybody, in every nation, in every race, and in every religion. To hear someone say that all the people that belong to a certain country, race, or religion are bad — is extremely untruthful and makes the person making the statement lose credibility right away. We are all flawed and even nature is flawed. Nobody is perfect, and no country, race or religion is perfect. Duality and polarity are imprinted in everything in nature — in all humans, and even within ourselves. For example, there are those who are ignorant, and those who are wise.

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALL When he is born, a baby's head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes look out with the blur of eyes which see for all species. He has remembered his own nature from past patterns. Now his heart beats through rock, sky, oceans. He feels the silence and the sound all around the world beneath his skin. We all hold somewhere deep within us the truth we accepted in innocence. The seas, the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, are all vital parts of an ongoing system. By harming any part of it we must ultimately harm ourselves. It is that simple.

The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart. "Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price.

The ugliest thing in any landscape: people.

The ultimate power to create or destroy resides in nature.Nature has the power to eliminate all life forms, in the blink of an eye.

The unity of Nigeria will only come if we overcome and overgrow tribe, materialism and selfish human nature.

The Universe is continuously emerging as a fresh creation at every moment. All point to this same, extraordinary insight. The Universe is not static, nor is its continuation assured. Instead, the Universe is like a cosmic hologram that is being continuously upheld and renewed at every instant.14 A universal encouragement found across the world’s wisdom traditions is to live in the ‘NOW.’ This core insight has a clear basis in physics: The present moment is the place of direct connection with the entire Universe as it arises continuously. Each moment is a fresh formation of the Universe, emerging seamlessly and flawlessly.

The USA is a beautiful country...when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.

The universe was happy when the sky was born. The sky was happy when the stars were born. The stars were happy when light was born. Light was happy when the world was born. The world was happy the day you were born. God wanted to be happy so He created the world. God wanted the world to be happy so He created man. God wanted man to be happy so He created the sky. God wanted the sky to be happy so He created stars. God wanted stars to be happy so He created the universe.

The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that which is not ‘body’ is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.

The very air they breathed was almost a juice.

The vast and beautiful world is the home we share together.

...the Vegetable World has a higher significance than either the education of man's intellect, or even the maintenance of animal life. With its sweet influences, man's heart, —his moral nature, is in intimate communion; and through them, God reveals himself to the soul in his most endearing attributes. By the teachings of the Vegetable World the tone of our moral being is affected in no small degree, and flowers are often interwoven with the web of human destiny. In a word, the heart of man is susceptible of no purer or more enduring earthly pleasure, than that which it experiences in its free communion with the exhaustless beauties of the Vegetable World.

...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91]

The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions.

The very small quantum world, it seems, is a mixture of possibilities. The quantum fields to which all particles belong are the sum of these possibilities and, somehow, one possibility is chosen out of all the existing ones just by seeing it, just by the very act of detecting it, whenever one tries to probe a particle's nature. Nobody knows why or how this happens.

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

The way to beautify your soul is to live the beauties of nature!

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

The water of such a nation (living godly) will not fail. Talking of harmony between the people of the land and nature. Natural catastrophes and disasters shall be far from such a people. There shall be rain in its time, sun in its time. Nature will respond adequately to the needs and desires of such a people.

The waters of the stream played the part of the orchestra, and the sunlight provided the dancers. Every now and then a crescendo of wind highlighted the symphony in the clearing by the creek.

The weather here is windy, balmy, sometimes wet. Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement - mating season. And lots of fresh rabbit meat hopping about to feed the young ones with.

The weather was clear and still, and the countless stars opened above them, seeming like brilliant cold fruits that Maerad could simply pick out of the sky.

The whole of life but labours in the dark. For just as children tremble and fear all In the viewless dark, so even we at times Dread in the light so many things that be No whit more fearsome than what children feign, Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark. This terror then, this darkness of the mind, Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light, Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse, But only nature's aspect and her law.

The whole tradition of [oral] story telling is endangered by modern technology. Although telling stories is a very fundamental human attribute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats 'narrative loss' -- the inability to construct a story of one's own life -- as a loss of identity or 'personhood,' it is not natural but an art form -- you have to learn to tell stories. The well-meaning mother is constantly frustrated by the inability of her child to answer questions like 'What did you do today?' (to which the answer is usually a muttered 'nothing' -- but the 'nothing' is cover for 'I don't know how to tell a good story about it, how to impose a story shape on the events'). To tell stories, you have to hear stories and you have to have an audience to hear the stories you tell. Oral story telling is economically unproductive -- there is no marketable product; it is out with the laws of patents and copyright; it cannot easily be commodified; it is a skill without monetary value. And above all, it is an activity requiring leisure -- the oral tradition stands squarely against a modern work ethic....Traditional fairy stories, like all oral traditions, need the sort of time that isn't money. "The deep connect between the forests and the core stories has been lost; fairy stories and forests have been moved into different categories and, isolated, both are at risk of disappearing, misunderstood and culturally undervalued, 'useless' in the sense of 'financially unprofitable.

The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.

The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong.

The wisdom teachings that permeate this book revolve around the truth that radically honest, compassionate self-exploration leads to self-awareness, and that true self-awareness is always healing. It opens us to the naturalness of love, peace, joy, and our own boundless creativity. Love, and especially self-love and acceptance, is the greatest healing force that I have gleaned thus far.

The whole of Nature is a book, the heavens a scroll; and they were intended to be used as such.

The wind blew stronger. Masakichi had to walk into its resistance, but his pace did not slow. The further he went, the faster he moved, soundlessly and forcefully. The earth smelled like rain. He had to find a way out. Alive. His grandfather Jinzaemon had taught him how to find a straight path, even in the wind. Jinzaemon was born in 1848, twenty years before Japan first opened its doors to the West. He had taught Masakichi all about ninjutsu. “If you want to go straight against the wind, find a path in its folds and pass through it,” he had said, al- though he’d never actually taught his grandson how to find it. Still, Masakichi had begged him. “Even if I teach you where the path is, you won’t be able to see it because the wind is always changing. If I show you the path in the wind one minute, the wind will shift and the path will disappear the next.” “Then how do I find it?” Masakichi had asked, worried he’d never be able to do it. “You must find it anew each time,” his grandfather smiled. “The only way to see the path in the wind is to become the wind itself.

The wind and the grass and something in the sky, sun, or moon, shining on our backs as we run: They are gifts that humans toss away like socks on Christmas morning, because we see them every day and don't think of them as gifts anymore. But new socks are always better than old socks. And the wind and grass and sky, I think, are better seen with new eyes than jaded ones. I hope my eyes will never grow old.