c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...
— John Stuart Mills
Later, Ella looked for the two swallows in the eaves outside the window, watching them even more closely now. The thought of them flying all that way, across mountains and seas and returning here, because this was their home - of them knowing how to find it - changed things. It was a new way of seeing; this was no longer just the place where women and men were kept, but the home of other creatures too, ones that had travelled far and still chosen it because this, above all other places, was the place to bring their families into the world.
— Anna Hope, The Ballroom
Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
Being born in a place is only one way to belong, nor do you have to die there....I knew at once that Magdala was home because I felt sighted there again, second sighted. It was not only the spring. In time everything spoke.When birds rose into the air, I could read the pattern of their wings, and the path the wind made on the water carried messages. The very ground said make a path here, plant herbs there. These vine are not dead. Tend them and they'll bear fruit again. Ancient trees offered shelter and wisdom as well as olives. And there were certain rocks that could absorb fatigue or agitation, leaving me refreshed and calm.
— Elizabeth Cunningham, The Passion of Mary Magdalen
Of course, accidents will happen in wild-folk families just as among us humans, only in a wild-folk family, an accident is more apt to be fatal.
— Samuel Scoville Jr., Wild Folk
...there is something which impresses the mind with awe in the shade and silence of these vast forests. In the deep solitude, alone with nature, we converse with God.
— Thaddeus Mason Harris
I'll never see Ivy alive again.But she's still everywhere. In every drop of bubbling swamp water. In every leaf hanging from every tree. In every speck of swamp mud. In every blade of grass. In every gift she left behind for me: two sacks of miscellaneous objects, a grass bracelet, her home, her love, and my life.A swamp angel named Ivy lived in my backyard. And now she doesn't.But wherever she is, I know she's watching me.Just like the angel she's always been.
— Colleen Boyd, Swamp Angel
Nature has wrought with a bolder hand in America.
— Nathaniel Parker Willis
Trust nature and make peace with something in your life.
— Danielle Barone
She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.
— Mary Webb, Gone to Earth
Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.
— C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.
— Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God: and other Essays by Aldo Leopold
If only humans could die like the autumn leaves, with a splash of beauty and the promise of another season.
— Shana Chartier
The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.
— John O'Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
She ran as the first maples started to change color, then the oak.She jumped over roots, she sidestepped brambles, her footfalls echoing off plank bridges traversing streams.She was the first person at practice. The last to go home.She ran for speed. She ran for distance. She stretched carefully first thing in the morning and last thing before bed.
— C.D. Bell, Weregirl
For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I’ll consider it.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?""Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very.""Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness.""I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying, are they?""It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only agreed.""And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, "can they be good?"He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?
— Charles Williams, Descent into Hell
Men were foolish and were made only so that they should die, while mountains and rivers went on for ever and did not notice the passing of time.
— Roald Dahl, Katina
Nature we have always with us, an in exhaustible store-house of that which moves the heart, appeals to the mind and fires the imagination -- health to the body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul.
— John Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril
The weather was cheerful, the breath of spring animating. She watched the swelling of the buds—the peeping heads of the crocuses—the opening of the anemones and wild wind-flowers, and at last, the sweet odour of the new-born violets, with all the interest created by novelty; not that she had not observed and watched these things before, with transitory pleasure, but now the operations of nature filled all her world; the earth was no longer merely the dwelling place of her acquaintance, the stage on which the business of society was carried on, but the mother of life—the temple of God—the beautiful and varied store-house of bounteous nature.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Nature is the guardian of Africa. While the sun lights the African sky in day time, the moon begs the world to help her lighting Africa in the night
— Munia Khan
Consciousness is a born hermit.
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason and Other Works by George Santayana
Something inside me stops the moment I see a mighty mountain.
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber
I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.
— Anne Frank
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
— Theodor Adorno
Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.
— Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
All the Creator's children are blessed with gifts. We are all given special skills to assist each other her, including animals, plants and insects.
— Eileen Anglin
How great are the advantages of solitude! -- How sublime is the silence of nature's ever-active energies? There is something in the very name of wilderness, which charms the ear, and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it.
— Estwick Evans
It didn’t matter that she didn’t live here, that a relationship was out of the question. It was probably because a relationship wouldn’t happen that he could let himself get this close. He wrapped his arms tighter around her as though this were all that existed in the world. Just the two of them, the mountain, the clean winter air. The taste of her tongue on his lips.
— Rebecca Brooks, Make Me Stay
Always try to be Natural in all Perspectives of life because there is no alternative of Natural Blessings.
— Arbab J. Edhi
Nature does not abandon us. Rather, it helps us in accepting our loss, grief and pain. It stays with us, even cries with us. It gifts us openings, may be more than once, to heal, transcend and re-emerge. (Page xii)
— Neena Verma, A Mother's Cry... A Mother's Celebration
Nature releases resistance sometimes slowly, other times powerfully, and always by example. Suddenly out of that calm comes momentum from a new direction.
— Colleen Mariotti, Livology: A Global Guide to a Deliberate Life
Now tell me what you’re afraid of.”“Uncle Nathan is right about this tree. It’s got some kind of spirit in it. And it doesn’t want me to leave.” I saw my dad smile and shake his head. “I’m serious, Dad. You can’t send those guys up here again. The tree will try to kill them before it lets them take me down. Didn’t you see it happen?”“I saw a couple of accidents…”“And Ronnie fell yesterday, but somehow I’m able to be up in this tree no problem. I got up here without any ropes or ladders. Don’t you find that mysterious? Uncle Nathan doesn’t. Grandfather doesn’t.”“They are both superstitious, that’s all.”“I know,” I said. “And what about that, Dad? You’ve spouted all your legends and myths at me my whole life, and now you suddenly don’t care about them? That doesn’t make any sense.”He sighed so deeply I could hear it. “I study those legends to get to know our culture, our heritage. I don’t believe that they are literal truths.”“But what about the mermaids?” I pressed. “Remember the big story you told about the singing boat and the killer whale? It was you who told me that maybe the story was wrong and it wasn’t a singing boat; it was a mermaid under the boat.”“I remember, but I had a real mermaid staring me in the face at the time. There isn’t anything like that going on right now.”“I hear whispers coming from the tree. It moves on its own. It is warmer than it should be…”“You’ve been up there too long. You’re delirious.”I grunted at him. “It started before I climbed up!”Dad rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know what you want me to do here.”I turned on the camera and flipped the digital pictures until I found that one with the face. I stuck it in the bucket and lowered it down to my dad and told him to take a look.“Is that as good as a mermaid right in front of you?”He studied the picture a moment and then replied, “I always see faces in the knots of trees. Who doesn’t? I think that’s why so many people create horror stories about them.
— D.G. Driver
To love the creations of the Earth is to worship the Being who created them.
— Seth Adam Smith, Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
What does natural mean?Means non-artificial. Made by nature.But nature can't make things. It's not a person.Nature is the things that aren't made by people.But we're made by people, so what does that make us? Are we artificial?
— Rob Davis, The Motherless Oven
Animal thoughts are dangerous,’ the woman told her gently. ‘Animals are too wild. Talking to them and looking inside their minds can harm you, because they just want to turn you into one of them. You’re going to have to learn to use your powers responsibly.
— L.A. Randomfox, The Mark of the Red Paw
If you were a bird, and lived on high,You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,You'd say to the wind when it took you away:"That's where I wanted to go today!
— A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
The earth has its music for those who will listen.
— George Santayana
With all colors combined the world shines
— Arefin Bashar Arif
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
All around us, birds woke up the sky.
— Lauren Wolk, Wolf Hollow
...landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.
— simon schma
If you were a cloud, and sailed up there,You'd sail on the water as blue as air.And you'd see me here in the fields and say:"Doesn't the sky look green today?
— A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on to say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into the world?' The student of nature will only laugh at you; just as a carpenter or a shoemaker would laugh, if you found fault with the shavings and scraps from their work which you saw in the shop. Yet they, at least, have somewhere to throw their litter; whereas Nature has no such out-place. That is the miracle of her workmanship: that in spite of this self-limitation, she nevertheless transmutes into herself everything that seems worn-out or old or useless, and re-fashions it into new creations, so as never to need either fresh supplies from without, or a place to discard her refuse. Her own space, her own materials and her own skill are sufficient for her.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose the magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything.
— Max Weber
People who fell in love at first sight, rushed home to their parents to tell them the good news and subsequently married were, [Patricia Highsmith] thought, retarded. Rather, a more honest appraisal of the nature of love positions it nearer to the horrors of mental illness. How else could you explain the fact that so many people were prepared to sacrifice the safety and cosiness of their lives for the thrill of a new romance?
— Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, Ζωή στο σκοτάδι
Our mind stops racing when we take a nature walk or just look at the clouds that disintegrate at the horizon.
— Balroop Singh
I myself always to keep alive I'll enjoy the beauty of nature at close quarters.
— Tanmaya Guru
The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
See how forgiving - how brave nature is.
— Yusef Komunyakaa, The Emperor of Water Clocks
The afternoon our story begins, the quiet parts of being alive were the busiest: wind unlocking Windows; rainlight nudging curtains apart; fresh-cut grass tickling unsocked feet. Days like this made Alice want to set off on a great adventure.
— Tahereh Mafi, Furthermore
A verse from a short poem - 'Philosophy is Forestry's Child' - in my Foreword:Ask not which came first, the acorn or the oak.We came as children of the forest;First our wooden cradle, then our kindling for industry.Instead think forward –– trees will shelter us from ourselves.
— Gabriel Hemery, The Man Who Harvested Trees and Gifted Life
You have the touch of nature you know, where she touches everything that is dead and they spring back into life again. I realised that the day you touched me for the first time. I felt I was standing somewhere I had never been before and all of a sudden life started pouring over me like a rain and drenching me with it. I had never felt that alive before.
— Akshay Vasu
The first step is to stop thinking of nature as something far away that we must save from someone else and start seeing it all around us. The first step is to open our eyes to the existence of nature in our daily lives.
— Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness
No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be.
— Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn
Step outside for a while - calm your mind. It is better to hug a tree than to bang your head against a wall continually
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
The rain swirls over the trees and roofs of the town, and the parched earth soaks it up, exuding a fragrance that comes only once in a year, the fragrance of quenched earth, the most exhilarating of all smells.
— Ruskin Bond, Delhi Is Not Far
We all are travelers traveling on a very big spaceship called Earth. Let's not ruin the engines of our very own spaceship in the name of development.
— Mohith Agadi
Everybody is unique and different. Nobody is the same as anyone else. there is no 'normal' - it is a lie taught to us by a system so flawed that it is threatened by the awesome diversity of nature.
— Christina Engela, Demonspawn
Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn’t notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
Voting on things is democratic, yes - but not on deciding on whether or not people should be equal or have human rights. That isn't democracy, it is mob rule.Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy.
— Christina Engela, Inanna Rising: Women Forged in Fire
Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy.
— Christina Engela, Fearotica: An Anthology of Erotic Horror
When I am in nature, my heart dances with butterflies and sings along with flowers.
— Debasish Mridha
To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)
— Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
Serenity is when I realized I'm blessed with beautiful nature around.
— divyaelizabeth
The selfishness of humanity is rooted in the self-destructive nature of man through sin. Romans 6:23
— Felix Wantang, God's Blueprint of the Holy Bible
Open your eyes to the nature- purify your mind and soul
— divyaelizabeth
There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
I love the morning sun because it enlightens my heart and teaches me how to love others with an abundance of warmth and kindness.
— Debasish Mridha
Wearing a smile while claiming to not judge and condemn people as you equate their nature with no less than a carnal and immoral act rather than as understanding their orientation and identity as an intrinsic part of who they are doesn't lessen the harshness and cruelty of that rejection.
— Christina Engela
In a natural environment, nature controls the breeding cycles. In the man-made environment, abnormal environmental conditions control the unnatural breeding cycles.
— Steven Magee
Dawn and dusk are mutual friends of the sun
—  one opens the door for him to a brand new day and the other one has to shut it to embrace the darkness of night.
Each malevolence has a cousin that heals it. I fancy Hurtsickle and Heartsease as herbal enemies –weeds growing in reach of one another
—  the bite and the balm in balance.
I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I'm not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterlies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven't been falling all the time.I've been flying.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
One by one and then together the birds chanted, warbled, whistled, and cooed, like a rare desert plant bursting into life after the rain.
— Mike Bond, The Last Savanna
But the most dangerous thing that camp had taught me was the awful lesson of country living: out there, in the open, in the quiet, all the emptiness pressed itself up against you, pawed at the very center of your heart, convinced you to make friends with loneliness.
— Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman
Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'.
— Peter Wohlleben
To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. It has to be a personal experience because nothing short of living through it can fully convey all it means to a people for whom it is not only the source of life, but also their most exciting impact with nature.
— Khushwant Singh, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale
Surfing's a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf, you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Nature: it might be the magical key to unlock a locked imagination.
— Kami Guildner, Firedancer: Your Spiral Journey to a Life of Passion and Purpose
The man stood alone by the hive. On impulse he put his palm against the wood, as if feeling for a pulse.
— Laline Paull, The Bees
We must stop seeing the natural world as a commodity and start seeing it as we would see a family member, something to love, protect, care for, and cherish.
— Barry Babcock, TEACHERS IN THE FOREST: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
The forest talks but a good hunter only hears it by learning its language.
— Barry Babcock, TEACHERS IN THE FOREST: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
On a winter’s day when a person’s spirits may be low and to behold thirty to one-hundred Evening Grosbeaks busily gorging themselves on bird seed and perched in a stand of pines with all of them creating a cacophony of sparrow like chirps, this is real therapy for me. It is an act of contagious optimism. It is at such times I realize that a bird can do more for me than a shrink.
— Barry Babcock, TEACHERS IN THE FOREST: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always.
— James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
No animal could change the character of the land as the presence of the wolf had that day.
— Barry Babcock, TEACHERS IN THE FOREST: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
The green began to seethe.
— Laline Paull, The Bees
717! You are behaving like a demented bluebottle - stop that!
— Laline Paull, The Bees
It was magic, the oldest magic of all when day became night, gods working in tandem, and I gave it the full benefit of my witness for the singular wonder it was.
— J.D. Stanley, Blood Runner
Although the gods were in the distant skies,Pythagoras drew near them with his mind;what nature had denied to human sight,he saw with his intellect, his mental eye.When he, with reason and tenacious care,had probed all things, he taught-- to those who gatheredin silence and amazement-- what he'd learnedof the beginnings of the universe,of what caused things to happen, and what istheir nature: what god is, whence come the snows,what is the origin of lightning bolts--whether it is the thundering winds or Jovethat cleave the cloudbanks-- and what is the cause of earthquakes, and what laws control the courseof stars: in sum, whatever had been hid,Pythagoras revealed.
— Ovid
The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
Not for the first time, I wonder what it would feel like that, to be so beautiful that you don't even realize people are watching you, to be so confident that you don't even have to worry about being nervous or feeling self-conscious. I've spent my whole life trying to pretend I'm that way. What would it be like to have it just come naturally?
— Lauren Barnholdt, The Thing About the Truth
A poet warrior realizes both the brutality and the beauty in life, and apprehends that the suffering we tragically endure is partly what makes us human. What also makes us human is the ability to love, the ability to stand in nature’s presence, and to nurture this earthly paradise to tend to our family’s needs.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
... and isn't the world a treasure in itself? A spectacle glittering every single day, without a concern if anyone's watching or not. It simply goes on, elegantly, letting nature have its way. We only need to open our eyes to witness the biggest masterpiece ever created, the ticket is already in your hand.
— Charlotte Eriksson
To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.
— Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays
The clouds had gathered, within the last half-hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still and colourless – met us without a smile.
— Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity’s claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
— Mary Oliver, Red Bird
When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca
Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. This disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,boulders, and caves where Kami nature spiritsminister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root, and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.
— Jalina Mhyana, The Wishing Bones
Character is what a man is in the dark
— Dwight L. Moody
Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.
— John Berger, Why Look at Animals?
Nature is the my best teacher.
— Tanmaya Guru
Nature! I think it my duty to serve its beauty.
— Tanmaya Guru
I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud).
— Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
MORNINGTIDEThe wonderful works of morningtidebring the sight of luminous whiteness,a breathing whimsyamong wind-tossed sprigs of green.
— Tara Estacaan
A camel brayed columns from the rondavels
—  new sunlight struck the savage earth.
When I am lost in the wonder of nature, my life is vivacious.
— Debasish Mridha
Peace within us translates to our exterior world. Our outer and inner state of peace is directly related to each other. It's simply impossible to have lasting peace around us unless we have peace within us.
— Janice  Anderson
The logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of "true" nature--the certainty that it's not even worth looking at. (62)
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
There's nothing man can imagine that nature hasn't already created a zillion times better.
— Stewart Stafford
One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.
— Barry López, Crossing Open Ground
If tonight is my last, I would run towards the sea, wildly swim the tides, the jump up the hills, flounder the cliffs and take all big strides, for I am a wanderer, awed by nature's charm who would love to breathe his last in its embracing arms.
— Arvind Parashar
Earlier People used to hate a lieSince now lie has become truth and truth has become a lie.They still hate a lie
— irrfan ishaq
Snow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.
— Mark Haddon, The Pier Falls: And Other Stories
Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law.
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.
— Mike Bond, The Last Savanna
Long before the stars died the birds began to sing - cool rippling doves, loud cheery starlings, the long lilting trills of warblers and thrushes.
— Mike Bond, The Last Savanna
How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
I feel a new era coming in, standing on the shore, waiting for it to slowly greet me.
— Charlotte Eriksson
The month of May is the pleasant time; its face is beautiful; the blackbird sings his full song, the living wood is his holding, the cuckoos are singing and ever singing; there is a welcome before the brightness of the summer.
— Lady Gregory, “Finn, Son of Cumhal”
And as a sign that everything was now all right in the world, she opened her mouth a fraction, and after arranging her sticky lips better around her old teeth, smacked them and settled down into a state of blissful rest. Levin watched these last movements of hers closely. ‘I’m just the same!’ he said to himself; ‘Just the same! Never mind... All is well.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I have thought that the word America must mean different things to the people who live under its aegis. I would that for each of them it might be symbolized by one -- at least one -- memory of some aspect of unspoiled nature. America -- wide, far-reaching, insouciant -- has been the amphitheater for our civilization. I wish each of us could appreciate its vast beauty, and could see how far the elements of our civilization fall short of the sheer majesty of our America.
— Harvey Broome, Out Under Sky Of Great Smokies: A Personal Journal
Dawn raced like fire across the savanna.
— Mike Bond, The Last Savanna
Nature isn't hate.
— Will Bly, Creatures: A Collection of Short Stories
Raithe enjoyed a good campfire. Something comforting about the dancing light, the smell of smoke, and the way his face and chest were hot but his backside cold. He sensed a profound meaning in this duality as well as in the enigma of flickering flames. The fire spirit spoke in spitting sparks and shifts of choking smoke, but the meaning of each remained a mystery. Everything in nature was that way. All of it spoke to him--to everyone--in a language few could understand. What secrets, what wisdom, and what horrors might he learn if only he knew what it all meant.
— Michael J. Sullivan, Age of Myth
My dear, dear aunt,' she rapturously cried, what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of any thing. We will know where we have gone -- we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarrelling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The Elven people believe that preservation of the land and all that lives and grows upon it, plant and animal alike, is a moral responsibility. They have always held this belief foremost in their conduct as creatures of the earth. In the old world, they devoted the whole of their lives to caring for the woodlands and forests in which they lived, cultivating its various forms of vegetation, sheltering the animals that it harbored. Of course, they had little else to concern them in those days, for they were an isolated and reclusive people. All that has changed now, but they still maintain a belief in their moral responsibility for their world. Every Elf is expected to spend a portion of his life giving back to the land something of what he has taken out of it. By that I mean every Elf is expected to devote a part of his life to working with the land–to repairing damage it may have suffered through misuse or neglect, to caring for its animals and other wildlife, to caring for its trees and smaller plants where the need to do so is found.
— Terry Brooks, The Elfstones of Shannara
Nature finds its peace in silence, forgiveness, and universal love.
— Debasish Mridha
There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.
— Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle
Faraway a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.
— Mike Bond, The Last Savanna
I wanted solitude, but a treasure like that didn't exist in the city. I only found silence in Central Park, still littered with people of course, but the only place that held moments of calm. I breathed in that wonderful silence as my pace finally slowed, and nature delighted my senses.
— Lee Matthew Goldberg, Slow Down
We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.
— Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they [the laws of physics] look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere...they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment.
— Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
People don't know to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one.
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
Torches just blind you. On a clear night like this, the moon and the stars are enough.
— George R.R. Martin
...as young and as ancient as Spring....
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
And when the rains were over and it was October and the birds were in song again, I could lie in the sun on sweet-smelling grass and gaze up through a pattern of oak leaves into a blind-blue heaven. And I would thank my God for leaves and grass and the smell of things, the smell of mint and myrtle and bruised clover, and the touch of things, the touch of grass and air and sky, the touch of the sky's blueness.
— Ruskin Bond, Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas
...and all the stars flowered in the sky.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
The garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night.
— William Joyce, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs
Meanwhile, spring came, and with it the outpourings of Nature. The hills were soon splashed with wild flowers; the grass became an altogether new and richer shade of green; and the air became scented with fresh and surprising smells -- of jasmine, honeysuckle, and lavender.
— Dalai Lama XIV, Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama
I'm addicted to the entire planet. I don't want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells...
— John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid
For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated the laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosions of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.
— Linda Hogan
Living in sterile man-made environments that are disconnected from nature should be expected to lead to sickness.
— Steven Magee
Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.
— Linda Hogan, People of the Whale
There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.
— Linda Hogan, People of the Whale
A child is reliving millions of years of Evolution from a single cell to a XXI Century Human. This is the most amazing miracle I've ever encountered, and I am truly grateful to the Nature for letting me perform it - for letting me create a new life called Emily.
— Sophia Newtown
Life lies between the crossroads of the Nature of Mind and the Mind of Nature.
— Joey Lawsin, Creation by Law
Life lies between the crossroads of the Nature of the Mind and the Mind of Nature.
— Joey Lawsin, Creation by Law
Not by discovering new wow things you are able to understand the truth about nature, but by changing the very fundamental way of perceiving anything you've ever seen in daily life.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The Buddha is like space, with no inherent nature; appearing in the world to benefit the living, his features and refinements are like reflections.
— Thomas Cleary, Flower Ornament Scripture: Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra: v. 1
Only mountains can feel the frozen warmth of the sun through snow's gentle caress on their peaks
— Munia Khan
It was very damp and misty–which some people from outside the Pacific Northwest consider to be rain, but I do not. This is typical weather for the Pacific Northwest and Olympia. It is often wet in Olympia, but we have an average of only 49.95 inches a year of actual precipitation. That’s less than in Denver. In Olympia, the air is damp, and water collects and drips from everywhere. We do not get big downpours, but we get damp and spongy. I don’t care. It helps the trees grow, and I climb the trees.
— Ned Hayes, The Eagle Tree
If the solar winds have stirred far off in the velvety night then showers of light --gold and violet. rose and green--paint the sky.
— Kathleen Valentine, Each Angel Burns: A Novel
Gulls shriek plovers and sandpipers run up and down the beach. The tide is all the way out. The stone jetty from which people fish in the summer is covered with seals basking in the light.
— Kathleen Valentine, Ghosts of a Beach Town in Winter
The deer scent the wolves and stand silent and watchful. They turn and leap off like ballerinas, their plume-like tails raised in alarm.
— Kathleen Valentine, Each Angel Burns: A Novel
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
— Willa Cather
Education will teach you ephemeral things. God will teach you wonders.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
The attitude of Tao is of cooperation, not conflict. The attitude of Tao is not to be against nature but to be with it, to allow nature, to let it have its way, to cooperate with it, to go with it. The attitude of Tao is of great relaxation.
— Osho, Tao: The Pathless Path
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
— Joseph Conrad
Speechless is not even a good enough word to describe what I feel when I see the pictures of how we have transformed the world from the good to bad, from natural to artificial, physical appearance to daily makeup. I think I want to go with the word ENRAGED, DISGUSTED, or better yet INSULTED .
— Auliq-Ice
We worship life on Usonia. Nature... The moon, the sun, the stars, the rivers.
— L.T. Gibbons, Project Ark
As we delight in the strange and exotic beauty of orchid flowers, it is salutary to reflect that we are, in essence, looking at their genitalia.
— Unknown British Biologist
Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
— Leonardo da Vinci
The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.
— James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
And I sat there at the patio,while the whole of universe,was getting engulfed,in the whitest whiteness of snow.Down, near my rough paw,is soft snow,mannering a fidgeting embryo.I monitored the snow that plunged,on the soil of my backyard,and realized it melting fast.Was that the temperature or,my eyes on it overcast?While I think of this melted exalt,I am obliged to ask,What ought happens to the thoughts?Where do they get tossed?When they are forgot?Scorched?Scoffed?Deformed? Unadorned?
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber