Nature Quotes - Page 43

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

I think markets will never be efficient because of human nature.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

In earlier days, even as a child, the beauty of landscapes was quite clear to me. A background for the soul's moods. Now dangerous moments occur when Nature tries to devour me; at such times I am annihilated, but at peace. This would be fine for old people but I... I am my life's debtor, for I have given promises.

When I was a boy, I thought scent was contained in dewdrops on flowers and if I got up very early in the morning, I could collect it and make perfume.

The sculptor will chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways, if she can develop a little character. Everything must give way to that. Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing, manhood is everything.

It is life, I think, to watch the water. A man can learn so many things.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Calm and serene The sound of a cicada Penetrates the rock.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

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.

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

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

Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.

In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.

Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.

Human reason is by nature architectonic.

Will there be a time when equality will exist? I think given human nature there will always be conflict.

Nature is harmony in discord.

Fraternity among nations, however, touches the deepest desire of human nature

All excesses are inimical to Nature. It is safer to proceed a little at a time, especially when changing from one regimen to another.

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.