Quotations about Nature

 How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!  ~Emily Dickinson, letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper, 1880


I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains:  The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938


What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear


How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!  ~John Muir


Adopt the pace of nature:  her secret is patience.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.  ~George Washington Carver


Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  ~John Muir


God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Martin Luther


I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful.  Everything is simply happy.  Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance.  Look at the flowers - for no reason.  It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.  ~Osho


Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.  ~Kahlil Gibran


I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about.  But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.  ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982


I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.  Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.  ~Wendell Berry


And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?  ~Carl Sandburg, Good Morning America, 1928


I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.  ~e.e. cummings


The poetry of the earth is never dead.  ~John Keats


I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees.  The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.  It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day.  It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.  Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.  ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899


In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.  ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 22 December 1967


After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.  ~Author Unknown


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.  ~Juvenal, Satires


There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.  ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964


The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.  ~Galileo


I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.  ~Walt Whitman


Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.  ~John Muir


Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.
~Emily Dickinson


To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.  ~Jane Austen


Good heavens, of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it.  What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.  ~James Russell Lowell


Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.  ~Lao Tzu


As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.  ~Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping


Great things are done when men and mountains meet.  This is not done by jostling in the street.  ~William Blake


To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.  ~Helen Keller


Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Joy all creatures drink
At nature's bosoms...
~Friedrich von Schiller, "Ode to Joy," 1785, translated from German


What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.  ~William Shakespeare


I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted, 14 August 1966


I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.  ~William Hazlitt


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.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV


Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.  ~John Heywood, 1565





You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness - perhaps ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things...  ~Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, "Birds - And a Caution"  (Thanks, Corinne)


In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  ~Aldo Leopold


Nature hates calculators.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Sensitive Plant," 1820


Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein


I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.  ~Alan Hovhaness


Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.  ~Thornton Wilder


And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.  ~William Shakespeare


Climb up on some hill at sunrise.  Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you'll find it there.  ~Robb Sagendorph


I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them.
I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them.
I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness.
I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees.
I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender.
I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.
~Muriel Strode, "Creation Songs"


The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
~Sam Walter Foss


A rhododendron bud lavender-tipped.  Soon a glory of blooms to clash with the cardinals and gladden the hummingbirds!  ~Dave Beard


What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Hopkins

Quotations about Nature 2