quotations about nature
Nature looks with an equal smile on all.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
To every one [Nature] appears in a form of his own. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished. Force, maketh nature more violent in the return; doctrine and discourse, maketh nature less importune; but custom only doth alter and subdue nature. He that seeketh victory over his nature, let him not set himself too great, nor too small tasks; for the first will make him dejected by often failings; and the second will make him a small proceeder, though by often prevailings. And at the first let him practise with helps, as swimmers do with bladders or rushes; but after a time let him practise with disadvantages, as dancers do with thick shoes. For it breeds great perfection, if the practice be harder than the use. Where nature is mighty, and therefore the victory hard, the degrees had need be, first to stay and arrest nature in time; like to him that would say over the four and twenty letters when he was angry; then to go less in quantity; as if one should, in forbearing wine, come from drinking healths, to a draught at a meal; and lastly, to discontinue altogether. But if a man have the fortitude, and resolution, to enfranchise himself at once, that is the best.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Nature In Men", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies
The voice of Nature will consent, whether the voice of man do or no.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican.
HORACE MANN
A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Alas! The slaughter accomplished by man is so small a thing of itself in the carnage of the universe! The animals devour each other. The peaceful plants, the silent trees, are ferocious beasts to one another. The serenity of the forests is only a commonplace of easy rhetoric for the literary men who only know Nature through their books! ... In the forest hard by, a few yards away from the house, there were frightful struggles always toward. The murderous beeches flung themselves upon the pines with their lovely pinkish stems, hemmed in their slenderness with antique columns, and stifled them. They rushed down upon the oaks and smashed them, and made themselves crutches of them. The beeches were like Briareus with his hundred arms, ten trees in one tree! They dealt death all about them. And when, failing foes, they came together, they became entangled, piercing, cleaving, twining round each other like antediluvian monsters. Lower down, in the forest, the acacias had left the outskirts and plunged into the thick of it and, attacked the pinewoods, strangling and tearing up the roots of their foes, poisoning them with their secretions. It was a struggle to the death in which the victors at once took possession of the room and the spoils of the vanquished. Then the smaller monsters would finish the work of the great. Fungi, growing between the roots, would suck at the sick tree, and gradually empty it of its vitality. Black ants would grind exceeding small the rotting wood. Millions of invisible insects were gnawing, boring, reducing to dust what had once been life.... And the silence of the struggle!... Oh! the peace of Nature, the tragic mask that covers the sorrowful and cruel face of Life!
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
That God is in nature, filling it with himself, as the spirit fills the body with its presence, so that all nature forces are but expressions of the divine will, and all nature laws but habits of divine action -- this is the doctrine of Fatherhood.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
Nature, the vicar of the Almighty Lord.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Fowls"
Go and walk with Nature; thou wilt find
Full many a gem in her enchanted cup.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
Nature is nobody's ally.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"The Stone Fleet"
Nature, hating art and pains,
Baulks and baffles plotting brains;
Casualty and Surprise
Are the apples of her eyes.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Nature I
Nature is not apart from us, nature is us.
THOMAS RANIER
"Call of the wild: Look to nature for garden guidance", Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 12, 2017
Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Nature in Men", Essays
We live in the midst of [Nature] and are strangers. She speaks to us unceasingly and betrays not her secret.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
The line of Nature is crooked ... though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can, the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Nature is undeniably one of the most therapeutic and necessary components of human existence that we can experience.
RYAN BROWER
"Braille trails help the visually impaired enjoy nature", Grind TV, August 14, 2017
Our relationship with nature is dependent on more than the way the wind blows and the flowers bloom.
SHAUN HURRELL
"After the Arab Spring: learning to love nature again", Birdlife, August 11, 2017