Best 6303 quotes in «nature quotes» category

If the monkeys had been concerned only with monkey Beings they would never have become men.

If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

If the world were a big apartment, we wouldn't get our deposit back.

If this [the Mysterium cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible. The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.

I fully support the goal of species protection and conservation and believe that recovery and ultimately delisting of species should be the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's top priority under ESA.

If we are immortal it is a fact in nature, and we are not indebted to priests for it, nor to bibles for it, and it cannot be destroyed by unbelief.

If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse

If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature--even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe--has to change.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it's primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, 'What you don't have in your mind, you have on your shelf.' But now we have the Web.

If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

If we knew enough, fortune would turn out to be nature.

If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures - not on short-term exploitation - but on long-term, sustainable development.

If we once, and for so long, lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

If you are not radiant with joy and friendliness, if you are not filled to overflowing with love and goodwill for all beings and all creatures and all creation, one thing is certain: you do not know God!

If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.

If you are on the side whence the wind is blowing you will see the trees looking much lighter than you would see them on the other sides; and this is due to the fact that the wind turns up the reverse side of the leaves which in all trees is much whiter than the upper side.

If you are missing out on the natural joy and wisdom of life, it is because you have been taught to ignore it....Reconnecting with nature consists of bringing into your consciousness a sensory way of thinking and relating with which you are born

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back.

If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

If you see your nature, you don't need to read sutras or invoke buddhas. Erudition and knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness. Doctrines are only for pointing to the mind. Once you see your mind, why pay attention to doctrines?

If you live according to nature, you never will be poor; if according to the world's caprice, you will never be rich.

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

If you thrive on the city energy it is necessary to leave the city frequently and to walk in parks, to get away from people. You are more sensitive than you realize. Find a spot that makes you happy.

If you throw a stone in a pond... the waves which strike against the shores are thrown back towards the spot where the stone struck; and on meeting other waves they never intercept each other's course... In a small pond one and the same stroke gives birth to many motions of advance and recoil.

If you want to say how can we step into childhood and make it better for them, I would start at the activity level. I'd like to say let your kids go out and play.

I go now to the wilderness to be a part of it; to accept my place in the world and its place in me; to grow into reality as a tree grows into the rain, to conform to the Earth as a stream conforms to the stones of its bed. To live. To aspire. To be.

If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can't help but learn.

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.

I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?

I guess he was such an open, emotional vessel that I think he tapped into human nature, so it just left people wondering what would have happened. I think James Dean would be 83 today. He could be here, what would he be doing?

I have a kind of respect - a worshipful attitude, even - for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons.

I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.

I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his

I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple

I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.

I honor the wisdom of life. I learn from life in all its forms. The tree teaches me. The sparrow and the wren sing my song. I am open to the lessons Life brings me from the earth. I learn from the wind, from the sun, from the small flowers, and from the stars. I walk without arrogance. I learn from all I encounter. I open my mind and heart to the guidance and love that come to me from the natural world.

I hold it to be one of the distinguishing excellences of elective over hereditary successions that the talents which nature has provided in sufficient proportion, should be selected by the society for the govenment of their affairs, rather than that this should be be transmitted through the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the table to those of the bed.

I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.

I hope to bring ancient philosophy and new scientific thinking together, to provide a new perspective of nature, especially the relationship between nature and man.

I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

I hope and pray that mother nature is leaving us alone to get on with the job of cleaning up and recovering from this event.