Nature Quotes #10

"It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky."
—Simone Well

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
—Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac


Habitat is not only removed quietly from a generation of man, but from multiple generations of wildlife, who unknowingly adapt to less, and become distorted by a change they never even feel.
—Dick E. Bird


Experimenting. . .
I hung the moon
on various
branches of the pine.
—Hokushi


I look upon the shadowed light,
that falls about the sill.
And see the morning sneaking in,
to clutch the day’s events.
Quiet sounds of birds splash the sunrise,
and baptize the new day.
I cannot hope for life to offer
a more wonderful gift than this.
—Dick E. Bird


Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of birds a symposium on the purpose of life would be inconceivable. They do not need it. We are not that self-reliant. We are the ones who have lost our way. —Brooks Atkinson

Man must understand his universe in order to understand his destiny. —Neil Armstrong

Nature Quotes #9

Find a special place, love it, protect it, refuse to let it go. Choose your mountain, your desert, your marshland, your place of power, and stand by it because even as one piece of land is protected, the whole planet rejoices. —Lou Gold

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. —Henry David Thoreau

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. —Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes. —Joan Baez

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing a bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. —John Rushkin

I do not think the measure of a civilization is how tall its buildings of concrete are, But rather how well its people have learned to relate to their environment and fellow man. —Sun Bear

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. —Henry David Thoreau

Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education. —David Polis

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay. —George Meredith

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

A garden isn’t meant to be useful. It’s for joy. —Rumer Godden

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. —Muir

If the earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools, and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball and at the creatures in the water. The people would declare it sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty, and to wonder how it could be. People would love it and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter. —Joe Miller

The Amazon is still burning; we just don’t hear the smoke detectors anymore. —Larry Gelbart

Humanity is the cancer of nature.

— Dave Foreman, Founder of Earth First!

“The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago ... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.” —Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

The sun is but a morning star. — Henry David Thoreau

Look deep into nature and you will find the answer to everything. —Albert Einstein

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. —Calvin and Hobbes

Life is such a very personal thing wrapped up within the being of every living creature, that it is sometimes hard to realize how intimately each life is connected with a great many other lives. Life is a flowing stream, forever passing away and as constantly being renewed. The energy that brings us life is supplied from many different sources, most of them beyond our vision of experience. The principles which govern all these interrelationships are called the principles of ecology—the science which deals with the mutual relations between living organisms and their environment. The subject of ecology is so vast and complex that no human mind has ever fathomed all its secrets. Many of them can probably never be unraveled, but the basic principles of ecology are known, and on the functioning of these known principles depends the future of all life.Can the human intellect deceive the evolution of life? Life is subject to automatic controls. Man has partially escaped these controls of nature. He has achieved almost unlimited power to multiply his numbers and at the same time destroy the world’s resources that might support him. Under the domination of his intellect, the world’s life, and the environment of that life, seem to have reached a crossroads, and the choice of direction is to be made now. —The Web of Life

Nature Quotes #8

God speaks to me in the stir of a leaf,In the glorious song of a bird;And my pew is a log or a mountain crag—Wherever His voice is heard. —G. C. Constable

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating. There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. —Ruskin

It is easiest to lose your way in the forest after it has been cut. —Lec

A bird in the hand makes blowing your nose difficult.

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. —Susan Ertz

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
—Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. —Emerson

Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse. —James Carswell

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise. —George Washington Carver

No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.
—Liewelyn Powys

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. —Roger Miller

Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it.

A peacock who sits on his tail is just another turkey

Nature Quotes #7

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. —William Blake

I don’t read no papers and I don’t listen to the radio either. I know the world’s been shaved by a drunken barber and I don’t need to read about it. —Walter Brennan

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. —Wendell Berry

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. —Marshall McLuhan

Wisdom begins in wonder. —Socrates

The Law locks up the hapless felon who steals the goose from off the common, but lets the greater felon loose who steals the common from the goose.
Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die. —Gil Stern

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way animals are treated. —Mahatma Gandhi

There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay some forms of life arise. —Charles Mackay (1814-1889)

Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life.
—Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.)

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience. —Emerson (1803-1882)

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. —Voltaire (1694-1778)

There is however, a true music of Nature - the song of the birds, the whisper of leaves, the ripple of waters upon a sandy shore, the wail of wind or sea. —Lubbock (1834-1913)

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. —Pope (1688-1744)

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in our nature. —Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road. —Alexander Smith

Man is the only asynchronous, heuristically-programmed computer which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

The man who invented the eraser had the human race pretty well sized up.

More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. —Woody Allen

If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! —Henry Longfellow

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance. —John Ruski

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. —Thomas Henry Huxley

...every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures. —Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945)

Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools. —Franklin D.Rooselvelt

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet’s irreplaceable capital. —Aldous Huxley Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conquerer and tyrant. —Aldous Huxley

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 roars; I love not man the less, but nature more. —George Gordon

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness. —John Muir

If having endured much, we at last asserted our ‘right to know’ and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals, we should look around and see what other course is open to us. —Rachel Carson

America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.
—Stewart L. Udall

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages. —Cyrano de Bergerac

Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. —Richard Feynman

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment. —Buckminster Fuller

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
—Theodore Roosevelt

We need the tonic of wildness [and]...nature. —Henry David Thoreau

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. —Aldo Leopold

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. —Marya Mannes

The joy of looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift. —Albert Einstein

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity. —Wordsworth

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences. —Robert Green Ingersoll

Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment. —Rene Dubos

We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making. —Joseph Chilton Pearce

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
—George Washington Carver

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object. —Henry Fuseli

Nature Quotes #6

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.
—Aldous Huxley

Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain. —Margaret Mead

There is however, a true music of Nature—the song of the birds, the whisper of leaves, the ripple of waters upon a sandy shore, the wail of wind or sea. —Lubbock

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.
—Henry Miller

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it's raining, but the feel of being rained upon. —E.L. Doctorow

Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants...have often been stay-at-home naturalists...concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area.
—Edwin Way Teale

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. —William Wordsworth
The miracles of nature do not seem miracles because they are so common. If no one had ever seen a flower, even a dandelion would be the most startling event in the world.
— Anonymous

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. — Albert Einstein

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
— E E Cummings

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. — Errol Flynn

I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something. — Jackie Mason

Lack of money is the root of all evil.
— George Bernard Shaw

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.
— John James Audubon

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.
— John Burroughs

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
— George Washington Carver

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries. — Jimmy Carter

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. — Kahlil Gibran

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them — Milne, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh

In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks. —John Muir

You cannot hold back a good laugh any more than you can the tide. Both are forces of nature.
— William Rotsler

educed, until we have only one: to fight for survival.
— Morris K. Udall

You can chase a butterfly all over the field and never catch it. But if you sit quietly in the grass it will come and sit on your shoulder. — Unknown

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter. —Winston Churchill

I went to a general store. They wouldn't let me buy anything specifically. —Steven Wright

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early. —Charles Lamb

We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world. —Dan Quayle

Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.
—Will Rogers

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air. —Jonathan Raban

My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. —Pablo Picasso

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy next to me. —Woody Allen

I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance. —Steven Wright

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
—Steven Wright

A fool and his money are soon elected.
—Will Rogers

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
—George Bush

I have orders to be awakened at any time in the case of a national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting. —Ronald Reagan

What is the good of having a nice house without a decent planet to put it on? —Henry David Thoreau

The variety of life in nature can be compared to a vast library of unread books, and the plundering of nature is comparable to the random discarding of whole volumes without having opened them, and learned from them. Our critical dependence on the great variety of nature for the progress we have already made has been amply documented. Indifference to the loss of species is, in effect, indifference to the future, and therefore a shameful carelessness about our children. —Peter Matthiessen

We consider species to be like a brick in the foundation of a building. You can probably lose one or two or a dozen bricks and still have a standing house. But by the time you've lost 20 per cent of species, you're going to destabilize the entire structure. That's the way ecosystems work.
—Donald Falk

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal. —Thomas Jefferson

To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. —Aldo Leopold

Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work. —Thomas E. Lovejoy

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. —Robert Lynd

Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own. —Norman Myers

The value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts. —Byran G. Norton

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. —Philip Shabecoff

What is the nature of a species that knowingly and without good reason exterminates another?
—George Small

Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back. —Gwyn Thomas

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. —Wallace Stegner

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. —Sir John Lubbock

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