For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
—Edward Abbey
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains. —Diane Ackerman
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
—Ansel Adams
Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool. —Mary Catherine Bateson
Rain! Whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains. —Henry Ward Beecher
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. —Wendell Berry
A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart. —Hal Borland
What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else. —Hal Boyle
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring—these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
—John Burroughs
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. —Albert Camus
Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries. —Jimmy Carter
Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.
—Anthony J. D'Angelo
Use what talent you possess - the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. —Henry Van Dyke
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. —Albert Einstein
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. —Henry Ellis
In your standard-issue family, of which few remain, but on which our expectations are still based, there are parents and there are children. The way you know which are which, aside from certain size and age differences and despite any behavior similarities, is that the parents are the bossy ones. —Delia Ephron
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
—John Fowles
The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. —John Muir
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. —Carl Reiner
Grass grows by inches but it's killed by feet. —George Thomas
It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel. —Bill Vaughan
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. —Tennessee Williams
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
—Andrew Wyeth
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
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. —Hamlin Garland
Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs 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
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
—Jean Giraudoux
When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word —religion. Then I go out and paint the stars. —Vincent Van Gogh A mistake is simply another way of doing things.
—Katharine Graham
I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it. —Debbie Harry
Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while. —Kin Hubbard
Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers. —Robert Green Ingersoll
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. —P. D. James
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future. —John F. Kennedy
Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world. —Virgil A. Kraft
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. —Charles Lindbergh
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. —Claude Monet
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! —John Muir
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. —Robert Louis Stevenson
