c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Putting on the collar is taking charge of unexpected situations. Keeping humans from taking control from me. To tell hunters that I'm not prey. Not a trophy by wearing the collar. I looked at the circlet again. Looking deeper, I see not subjugation, but a tool of power to control my fate in the world of man that symbolizes my ownership over both my nature spirit and wolf-self.
— Jazz Feylynn, Colorado State of Mind
The way the snowflakes float like tiny feathers—there’s an elegance to it. I could watch for hours. It’s hypnotic. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I stand on the beach, watching the waves. I’m mesmerized by the power, the vastness, and the mysteries of nature. There’s definitely something holy or divine about it. I wonder if it’s the same feeling people get when they enter a church.
— Alex Z. Moores, Living in Water
Come to the woods, for here is rest, ...climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
— John Muir
Now, over half of us live in an urban environment. My home, too, is here in the city of London. Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. It’s also very sobering, and reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world.Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. And surely, it is our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.
— David Attenborough
Looking deeper, I see not subjugation, but a tool of power to control my fate in the world of man that symbolizes my ownership over both my nature spirit and wolf-self.
— Jazz Feylynn, Colorado State of Mind
I suppose life is what you believe it to be. Perhaps believing in life is its true nature.
— R.W. Erskine
It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world. We are as good as blind to the wonder at our feet or the daily spectacle of an ever-changing sky.
— Laura Sewall
I began to reflect on Nature's eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish earth's purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will of life universal?
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
And what of Nature itself, you say--that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life--all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
...Nature has its unexpected and unappreciated mercies.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter it? What can one know of a girl that passes, slow steps homeward, out of thoughts, she can form an empire, locked up in her language, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine of the sea, she walks here already half divine.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
To be able to see and study undisturbed the processes of nature--I like better the old Biblical phrase "mighty works"--is an opportunity for which any man might feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.
— Czesław Miłosz
It takes two to Tao.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual
One by one, the electric lights ringing the lawn were ignited. Each one, as it burst into brilliance, erased a constellation from the evening sky.
— Tim Westover, Auraria
Above a certain size and level of prosperity, regional cities in Japan look alike. To discover what makes each one different, one has to sample the food and the sake, and stay long enough to see the patterns of life under the surface. Otherwise it can be hard to tell them apart. Wealth tends to smooth out the differences in the way people live. Life becomes standardized.Only in nature, in the mountains and valleys beyond the hand of man, are the real differences, the real uniqueness, preserved. There is something about the air in Hokkaido, a kind of richness that will never change. For better or worse, the only thing that really changes is people.
— Miyuki Miyabe, The Gate of Sorrows
To reciprocate God’s love is to have his love nature
— Sunday Adelaja
Although the deepest of snow in living memory lay upon the ground, the sun was shining and Aurelia breathed easiest out of doors. The four walls of any given room could not give her the horizons she longed for - horizons she could measure with her eyes and strive to conquer with her own two legs. She was like a wild animal, Cook always said.
— Tracy Rees, Amy Snow
To reciprocate God’s love is to have the nature of love
— Sunday Adelaja
Plants and Books are silent Friends to Mankind.The former grows silently to let you live.The later grows you silently to 'live
— Sridhar Movva
The snow in winter, the flowers in spring. There is no deeper reality.
— Marty Rubin
A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds lurk in the sky to pounce on a weasel or a mouse. You see that black cat, standing motionless in the grass. She is only waiting for an opportunity to kill. I detest all that naïve respect for nature. Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don’t have the same capability for suffering as human, because otherwise they couldn’t bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror.
— Milan Kundera, Immortality
Here is a wonderful habit: From time to time stop; move not; speak not; just watch the nature, because this is the best way to realise explicitly the miracles surrounding us!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
As it was universal truth no one can control the power of nature, it was useless to mourn when rain poured heavily when it was least needed.
— Deepika Kumaaraguru, Ethereal: The Dawn of the Blue
You mustn't bury yourself alive, forget to rise up, or bind yourself to the dust in melancholy surrender.
— Oddný Eir, Land of Love and Ruins
Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
— Guy de Maupassant, 88 More Stories
He is deaf, and keen to accept,any economical operation,that will correct his situation.He visited the doctor best,and started talking on subject,like the after-effects, and if any threats.The doctor medically checked,and asked him what he expects?He expressed, he wants to be addressed-in words, and not in signs.And how keen he is, to have his ears listening.He wants to listen the echo of,sun-set over that crimson dawn.He is keen to know, the sound of,a blooming rose.He wants to know what it sounds like,when a seedling grows.But Doctor- if you say: You are incapable,then I better get away,for then there is- nothing worth to be heard,in your seemingly wordy world.
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber
Diversity is Nature’s stronghold, yet that very diversity has become a curse for an entire species, which is supposedly the most advanced one on its planet.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance
Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.
— Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Pinecones. Little works of art. Prickly. Reminders of fall. Similar to pineapples. A sign of welcome.
— Mommy Moo Moo, Loblolly, Loblolly, You're So Tall
He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..
— Amanda Craig, A Vicious Circle
The field was covered with ice crystals sticking up like a garden of little diamonds. Sophia was beside her now, and the two animals walked slowly into the crystal blossoms. Flora was enchanted.For a moment she forgot she was hungry, tired, and ill-equipped to make this journey. She forgot to worry about Oscar. She forgot to worry that there would never be a useful job for her. She kicked up her front hooves with each step and watched the ice crystals scatter in front of her.
— Chris Kurtz, The Adventures of a South Pole Pig: A novel of snow and courage
As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.
— John Shelby Spong
There is no single concept of nature; it embraces everything that is fluid, changing, and mysterious. Ultimately, however, to “know nature” on earth is to live within it and to revere it in every way.
— Carolyn Merchant, Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution
Nature is powerless to put asunder.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
We should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide.
— Michio Kaku
All the time, I looked out our lattice window. I watched the birds fly by. I followed the clouds on their travels. I studied the moon as it grew larger, then shrank. So much happened outside my window that I almost forgot what was happening inside that room.
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
— Virginia Woolf
Dark spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.
— Jack London, White Fang
Never stop exploring... with Mother Nature by your side, the possibilities are endless.
— Cheryl Aguiar, Great Horned Owlets Rescue: Where There's a Will, There's a Way....
It's not about Indians, it's about people... the overall philosophy is to reconnect all people to nature and inevitably themselves. - Larry Stillday
— Michael Meuers, Road to Ponemah: The Teachings of Larry Stillday
Over the inter glaciers,I see the summer glow,And, through the wild-piled snowdrift,The warm rosebuds below.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children are never too young to begin the study of nature's book, and never too old to quit. ~Laura Hecox
— Candace Fleming, Women of the Lights
When we speak of the human animal's spontaneous interchange with the animate landscape, we acknowledge a felt relation to the mysterious that was active long before any formal or priestly religions. The instinctive rapport with an enigmatic cosmos at once both nourishing and dangerous lies at the ancient heart of all we have come to call "the sacred". Temporarily forgotten, paved over yet never eradicated, this old reciprocity with the breathing earth was here long before all our formal religions, and it will likely outlast all our formal religions. For it has always been operative underneath our various religions, nourishing them from below like a subterranean river. There is no disdain for religion in such a statement. We can honor the awesome eloquence of each religion while acknowledging the precarious nature of church-based faiths in today's crowded and crisis-ridden world, where people of divergent scriptures must somehow learn to get along. Our greatest hope for the future rests not in the triumph of any single set of beliefs, but in the acknowledgment of a felt mystery that underlies all our doctrines. It rests in the remembering of that corporeal faith that flows underneath all mere beliefs: the human body's implicit faith in the steady sustenance of the air and the renewal of light every dawn, its faith in mountains and rivers and the enduring support of the ground, in the silent germination of seeds and the cyclical return of the salmon. There are no priests needed in such a faith, no intermediaries or experts necessary to effect our contact with the sacred, since - carnally immersed as we are in the thick of this breathing planet - we each have our own intimate access to the big mystery.
— David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
Existence is a priceless gift and the beauties of nature are the priceless gifts of the existence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It's in the nature of the humans and the entire animal kingdom to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. But what makes us true humans is the power to not hit back.
— Abhijit Naskar
Water is taught by thirst;Land, by the oceans passed;Transport, by throe;Peace, by its battles told;Love, by memorial mould;Birds, by the snow.
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
The only unchanged by psyheeL :-It rains it dries the world rotateThey come and they go it's a common fateHuman love is a colored silk , it must fadeAnd even it's darkest of shade Misery and joy it's a constant change but Between sorrows and jollity something unchanged Nature, my love ; It remains the same.                                
— PSYHEEL
(...) pick up your axe, start at the rootsdon't miss the trunk, never forget:to end life truly and finallystart at the roots or end there.
— Moonshine Noire
He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.
— Robert Galbraith, Career of Evil
Alejandro de Humboldt National ParkOutside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people.One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct. The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles.“The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.
— Hank Bracker
One's course in life often pivots on small incidents.
— Sidney Huntington, Shadows on the Koyukuk: An Alaskan Native's Life Along the River
Don’t forget that the land is always out there, making its way, doing everything it can so you can breathe fresh air; so you can eat fresh food; so you can move and see and feel and think, and it’s on your side. The world is out there doing what it’s been doing way before you came here, it’s firm and strong and it takes a lot to bring it down.so from time to time, just go outside and look at this spectacle. This pure painting right in front of your eyes. No one created it. No one owns it. It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It simply is. So maybe, try a little tenderness. Just give it a chance to do what it can do. Just let it help you breatheand eatand moveand seeand maybe just try to live your life in a way that doesn’t kill this force of naturethat is just trying to give you a world worth living in. A clean world. A fresh world. Paths, forests, oceans, animals, oxygen, water. That’s all it takes.Just try a little tenderness towards this world we’ve been lucky enough to build our homes on. If you take care of it, it will take care of you.
— Charlotte Eriksson
Every New Year must be celebrated at the heart of nature - in the middle of a forest or by the side of a lake under billions of stars - because it is nature who has made our existence possible!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There’s a land—﻿oh, it beckons and beckons,  And I want to go back—﻿and I will.
— Robert Service
To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
When Mother Nature speaks, even the Gods hold silence.
— Abhijit Naskar
The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain.
— Adam Nicolson
The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.
— Henry Miller
and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Sir, I’ve known him ever since he was born! We’ve played snowball, and built snow-houses together, which are called igloos, and once, when one of Santa’s reindeer was sick on Christmas Eve, Snow Bear stepped in to help with the presents, and load them on the sleigh - he’s very kind, and clever, and strong, you know.
— Suzy  Davies, Snugs The Snow Bear
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.)
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
The more I see as I sit here among the rocks, the more I wonder about what I am not seeing.
— Richard Proenneke, One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
In fact, the advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine - that is not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification - enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.
— Annette Kolodny, Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters
In these days of instant gratification and electronic wizardry there are still some people, real people, who do not panic when their telephones fail because the batteries need re-charging. Instead they plug, not into an electronic device but into the earth, feel the wind in their hair, listen to the joyous, constant reaffirmation of running water and feel the good sun or refreshing rain on their skin. They, and only they, can be truly re-charged.
— Anonymous
All that we have achieved in life is creating a virtual reality for ourselves, while burying the actual reality! Our preference of technology over nature proves that Man is experiencing everything through the HEAD. What a pity!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
No, no, I will not live among the wild scenes of nature, the enemy of all that lives. I will seek the towns—Rome, the capital of the world, the crown of man's achievements. Among its storied streets, hallowed ruins, and stupendous remains of human exertion, I shall not, as here, find every thing forgetful of man; trampling on his memory, defacing his works, proclaiming from hill to hill, and vale to vale,—by the torrents freed from the boundaries which he imposed—by the vegetation liberated from the laws which he enforced—by his habitation abandoned to mildew and weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man
The prospect of death is nature's way of encouraging us to strive for greatness.
— Antonio Kowatsch
Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Feeling is never invisible; it takes shape and manifests as form everywhere in nature. Nature can, therefore, be viewed as feeling unfurled, a living reality in front of us and amidst us.
— Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science
Do not regret having lived, but while yet living live in a way that allows you to think that you were not born in vain.And do not regret that you must die: it is what all who are wise must Wish, to have life end at its proper time.For nature puts a limit to living as to everything else, And we are the sons and daughters of nature, and for us therefore the sleep of nature is nature's final kindness
— A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
When the Earth basks in the Sun's brilliance, you'll find me there with my arms spread wide and my face with a smile.
— Saim .A. Cheeda
Every step of the walk unburdens us of what we have just seen and thought while it simultaneously thrusts us into the previously unknown.
— Jeffrey Robinson
Homosexuality is nature’s way of keeping the population in check.
— Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience
A strange breeze rustled through the clearing, temporarily overpowering the stink of trash and murk. It brought the smell of berries and wildflowers and clean rainwater, things that might've once been in these woods. Suddenly I was nostalgic for something I'd never knew.
— Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
For growing again, one has to fall apart and fall to bits.
— raja shakeel mushtaque
It's completely okay to sediment and live a life on the base of the earth and not up high.--Like the pearls of sea found in its bottom, the pearls of life are also found in the niches of ground.
— raja shakeel mushtaque
Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.
— Abhijit Naskar
The Bible consistently and directly indicates that when we give generously, we're serving, honoring, and glorifying God. After all, generosity is fundamental to God's nature.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
Virgo is the smell of nature, but in a sexy way.
— Robert  Black
The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
— David Guterson
i dreamt i crawled on top of you and kissed your hips, one at a time, my lips a smolder. i straddled your waist and pressed both shaking hands against your torso. spongy, like an old tree on the forest floor. i push and your flesh sinks inwardly, collapsing with decay, a soft shushing sound. a yawning hole where your organs should be. maggots used to live here until your own poison killed them off. i laid my cheek into the loam and three little mushrooms brushed over my eyelid. peat, decomposing matter, all of it, whatever you wish to call it, rested in the cavity of your chest. and there i planted seeds in the hopes something good would come out of you.
— Taylor Rhodes, calloused: a field journal
Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines.
— D.H. Lawrence
There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys out warm being.
— D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy/Sea and Sardinia/Etruscan Places
The moment you let the mind overpower you, you get disconnected from nature. By and by you become less receptive more reactive; less innocent more cunning. Be wiser!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?
— Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
At first glance, northern hardwood and hemlock forests aren't very sexy - they are the accountants of the forest world, stable and consistent.
— Peter Quinby, Ontario's Old Growth Forests
You have a color of your own- Dark chocolate,You have a culture your own- Hip pop,You have a revival of your own- Harlem Renaissance,You are the spot on a ladybug that adds its beauty,You are the pupil of an eye,You are the vastness of space,You are the richness of soil,You are the sweetness of dark chocolate,You are the mystery in nature,Blessed Black chocolate, God has made You to rule the Land, that made You a slave.
— Luffina Lourduraj
When the spirit of nature touches us, our hearts turn into a butterfly!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There are times when the unseen can be even more dangerous than what our eyes behold.
— Erin Forbes, Fire & Ice: The Elementals
The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.
— David Eddings, Crystal Gorge
He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.
— Steven Millhauser, Little Kingdoms
Why do some trees stay green while others change their color?”“Certain trees need to show off, dear. I’m sure that my big brother could explain why it happens. Dahlaine loves to explain things, and he can be very tedious about it. I prefer simpler answers. The trees are sad because summer’s almost over.
— David Eddings, Crystal Gorge
Just because it doesn't happen within a wave of a wand, doesn't mean its not magic.
— Polkadot
It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.
— Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology
He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance.
— Michael Koryta, Rise the Dark
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
The cold and crystal clear water, it falls gently on the sleeper, cleansing the mind and soothing the soul...
— El Fuego
It’s different," Sorgan’s younger cousin Torl declared, gesturing at the glorious sunset late that afternoon. "It’s pretty enough, I suppose, but it’s not too much like the sunsets out at sea. Mountains seem to do peculiar things to the sky.""It’s the clouds, Captain Torl," Keselo explained. "Most of the time, I’d imagine, the clouds out over the sea sort of plod along from here to there. When they come to mountains, though, they have to climb up one side and then slide down the other. That sort of scrambles them, so they’re thicker in some places and thinner in others. That’s why we see so many different shades of red in a mountain sunset.
— David Eddings, Crystal Gorge
Once you are clear with the process of input-output and its consequence, you become more careful with every choice and decisions with your life.
— Roshan Sharma
We may be just a drop in the ocean, but even the ocean envies the depth of our love.
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
She dreamed of autumn. Of chilly autumn winds and soft fall rains. She could even feel the cool moisture as the rain drops touched her face and ran down her cheeks. Her denim skirt and work boots felt heavy as the rain in her dreams splashed cold water against them
— Grace Willows
Why does everyone see me as a sink when I am an ocean?
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven, the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, ... For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket: I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn't spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they'd crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Nature is in the process of shutting down corrupt corporations and their government minions.
— Steven Magee
Man might carve his mark on the earth but unless he's vigilant, Nature will take it all back.
— Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider
For nature does things in good order: And birds and butterflies recognizeNo man-made border
— Ruskin Bond
Take time to leave cities, at least once in a year, and go to some natural place, hills, sea, jungles, rivers, where you see nothing but nature… His creations. Where you only hear chirping of birds, clinkering of trees, murmuring of winds, splashes of water in the river, and uproar of waterfalls.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.
— Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
NOW this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back —For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but never too deep;And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep.The Jackal may follow the Tiger, but, Cub, when thy whiskers are grown,Remember the Wolf is a Hunter — go forth and get food of thine own.Keep peace withe Lords of the Jungle — the Tiger, the Panther, and Bear.And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar in his lair.When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail,Lie down till the leaders have spoken — it may be fair words shall prevail.When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must fight him alone and afar,Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be diminished by war.The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, and where he has made him his home,Not even the Head Wolf may enter, not even the Council may come.The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, but where he has digged it too plain,The Council shall send him a message, and so he shall change it again.If ye kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the woods with your bay,Lest ye frighten the deer from the crop, and your brothers go empty away.Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can;But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man!If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in thy pride;Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the head and the hide.The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must eat where it lies;And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or he dies.The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may do what he will;But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat of that Kill.Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his Pack he may claimFull-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may refuse him the same.Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her year she may claimOne haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may deny her the same.Cave-Right is the right of the Father — to hunt by himself for his own:He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the Council alone.Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw,In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of your Head Wolf is Law.Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is — Obey!
— Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
I stood there a long while, staring at that tree. It looked so strongSo beautiful. Hurt right down the middleBut alive and well. Cee touched my shoulderLightly. Frank? Yes? Come on, brother. Let's go home.
— Toni Morrison, Home
The sky is a meadow of wildstar flowers.
— Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
We must believe that there are places where tranquility exists and nature is given back her power to speak...
— Nanette L. Avery
I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I’d like to be. I guess I’d like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?
— Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
Your presence is enough to go through life. More and more you observe life, more and more you can let lose yourself with the free flow of life.
— Roshan Sharma
We must believe there are places where tranquility still exists and nature is given back her power to speak
— Nanette L. Avery
Nature allows one kind to kill another, it's part of the law ... you wonder if man might not be the most savage of all creatures. He's among the few that preys on nearly every other being, that constantly preys on his own species.
— Leonard Budgell, Arctic Twilight: Leonard Budgell and Canada's Changing North
In the tide pool I was riveted by fat pink sea stars sitting like satisfied gangsters and seemingly unconcerned by their exposure
—  gulls would peck at them but the sea stars simply grew replacement limbs.
With…love of wind, there is no surer test of genuine Nature instinct that this. Any body can love sunshine.
— anonymous, from "The Anthenaeum", 1877, in review of Thoreau
...is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?
— Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Everything was insanely alive, now you see it, now you don't. I thought, it's the light, it's the water, it's changing every second, it's always doing this whether I'm here to witness it or not.
— Mary Ellen Hannibal, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction
The sky seemed abruptly to have had enough of my dithering and dramatically lightened up around the glowing moon, which retreated like an aging sovereign before the rising sun.
— Mary Ellen Hannibal, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction
Between the beach and the big breaking waves about a quarter mile off was a stretch of bumpy, glistening reef, its usual blanket of water pulled back by a celestial hand.
— Mary Ellen Hannibal, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction
Heavens is here 'neath the mountain walls,In the song of the wind and the waterfalls,In the watchful stars that blanket the nightAnd the music of birds before the dawn light.Heaven is here in our mountain keep.In the silence and dim of the forest deep,From the chestnut tall as the mightiest mast,To the laurel flowers in the shadow it casts.Heaven is here on theses mountains high, In ancient stone castles that challenge the sky,In the thunder and flash that ring from their fightAnd the meadows made gold by the day's final light.
— Michael Oechsle
Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men’s way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.
— Baruch Spinoza, Complete Works
I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.
— Baruch Spinoza, Complete Works
The wild is where you find it, not in some distant world relegated to a nostalgic past or an idealized future; its presence is not black or white, bad or good, corrupted or innocent... We are of that nature, not apart from it. We survive because of it, not instead of it.
— Renee Askins
The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind?Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return. 'This is your work,' my friend told me, 'which is a work of substance and prayer and mad attentiveness, which is the real deal, which is why we are here.
— Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature
If people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
— John Muir, JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated): Picturesque California, The Treasures ... Redwoods, The Cruise of the Corwin and more
At that moment there was no need of any scientific knowledge to understand his communication of reassurance. The soft pressure of his fingers spoke to me not through my intellect but through a more primitive emotional channel: the barrier of untold centuries which has grown up during the separate evolution of man and chimpanzee was, for those few seconds, broken down.It was a reward far beyond my greatest hopes.
— Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man
What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared, - what are the towers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself...to the deep forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar! What is the echo of roofs...or or aisles that pealed the anthems of painted pomp, to the silence that has reigned in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation was spoken.
— Charles Fenno Hoffman, A Winter in the West
When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness...
— John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.
— Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation