c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.
— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
You wouldn't think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we'll do it one day. That's how negligent we are.
— Ian Rankin, Blood Hunt
Nature had squandered an unreasonable quantity of male beauty on this undeserving creature.
— Lisa Kleypas, Devil in Winter
nights and days came and passedand summer and winterand the sun and the windand the rain.and it was good to be a little islanda part of the worldand a world of its ownall surrounded by the bright blue sea.
— Margaret Wise Brown, The Little Island
The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
There is lace in every living thing: the bare branches of winter, the patterns of clouds, the surface of water as it ripples in the breeze.... Even a wild dog's matted fur shows a lacy pattern if you look at it closely enough.
— Brunonia Barry, The Lace Reader
Every springI hear the thrush singingin the glowing woodshe is only passing through.His voice is deep,then he lifts it until it seemsto fall from the sky.I am thrilled.I am grateful.Then, by the end of morning,he's gone, nothing but silenceout of the treewhere he rested for a night.And this I find acceptable.Not enough is a poor life.But too much is, well, too much.Imagine Verdi or Mahlerevery day, all day.It would exhaust anyone.
— Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings
You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
...for everytime I see the sky I'm aware of belonging to the universe than to just one corner of the earth.
— Ruskin Bond
The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
— H.G. Wells
Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts
—  the sight of the deep-blue sky and the clustering stars above seems to impart a quiet to the mind.
We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
— Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. 
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
In its complexity and sensuality, nature invites exploration, direct contact, and experience. But it also inspires a sense of awe, a glimpse of what is still "un-Googleable" . . . life's mystery and magnitude.
— Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids
I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.
— Richard Nelson, The Island Within
That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.
— Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first.
— Antoni Gaudí
Come see the cherry trees of a water constellationand the round key of the rapid universe,come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,come before its petals are consumed.
— Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye
—  looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
— Gustave Flaubert, November
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
— Aldous Huxley
He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.
— Wendell Berry
Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.
— Daniel C. Dennett
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions.
— Lorraine Anderson, Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature
A tree without roots is just a piece of wood.
— Marco Pierre White
Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.
— Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack
You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.'That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.
— Colette, My Mother's House & Sido
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walking
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star....As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.
— Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
A mistake is simply another way of doing things. 
— Katharine Graham
The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.
— David Brower
If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
If people think nature is their friend then they sure don't need an enemy.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Summer coming like a car from down the highway.
— Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...
— Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
as jolaha ka maram na jana, jinh jag ani pasarinhh tana;dharti akas dou gad khandaya, chand surya dou nari banaya;sahastra tar le purani puri, ajahu bine kathin hai duri;kahai kabir karm se jori, sut kusut bine bhal kori;No one could understand the secret of this weaver who, coming into existence, spread the warp as the world; He fixed the earth and the sky as the pillars, and he used the sun and the moon as two shuttles; He took thousands of stars and perfected the cloth; but even today he weaves, and the end is difficult to fathom.Kabir says that the weaver, getting good or bad yarn and connecting karmas with it, weaves beautifully. 
— Kabir, The Bijak of Kabir
While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
— Charles Baudelaire
The living sinners on deadly ground.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
You can predict anything in this world but not the nature's behaviour
— Ningraj
I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.
— Ouida, Wanda, Countess von Szalras.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
— Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.
— John Masefield
There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills  When all at once I saw a crowd  A host of golden daffodils  Beside the lake beneath the trees  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
— William Wordsworth, I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud
A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.
— Tomson Highway
I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would.""But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully."I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Don't you see visions?""No," said Doc.
— John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday
I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life--he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions--gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling--have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace.
— Gary Snyder
We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
— Francis Bacon
We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy ... It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong.
— Bob     Brown
When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.
— José Saramago
We must plant trees, grow gardens instead of lawns, ride bicycles when we can and support responsible local businesses over big brands.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Nobody can stop natural disaster, we are the cause and we are the remedy.
— Santosh Kalwar
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.
— Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
True wit is nature to advantage dressed;What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
— Alexander Pope
As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.
— Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.Their language has been lost.But not the gestures.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
— Jane Austen
I saw old Autumn in the misty mornStand shadowless like silence, listeningTo silence, for no lonely bird would singInto his hollow ear from woods forlorn,Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn; --Shaking his languid locks all dewy brightWith tangled gossamer that fell by night,Pearling his coronet of golden corn.
— Thomas Hood
Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
— Marquis de Sade
The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
— John Fowles
Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.
— Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand
Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet. ... When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true.
— Susan J. Tweit, Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey
Fanny spoke her feelings. "Here's harmony!" said she; "here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Talking about pollution, nobody's holy.They who pollute, sinned against nature.
— Toba Beta
Sophia and Grandmother sat down by the shore to discuss the matter further. It was a pretty day, and the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this--dog days--that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid. When the moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders.
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
So, that was Nature's way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insects suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitoes too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.
— John Marsden, Tomorrow, When the War Began
Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity."I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers."Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.
— David Almond, Skellig
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
— Edward Abbey
Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world’s total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately, that is where all interest in them ends. Because they are so little regarded, even by naturalists, mussels have vanished at an exceptional rate. Nearly half of all Smokies mussels species are endangered; twelve are thought to be extinct.This ought to be a little surprising in a national park. I mean it’s not as if mussels are flinging themselves under the wheels of passing cars. Still, the Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting-certainly the most striking-example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal-the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America's national parks this century.
— Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.
— Augustus
Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.
— Ernst Haeckel
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of human
— Anton Chekhov
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
— George Santayana
Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself...But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can't manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it...The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
— Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.
— Adriaan Kortlandt
We were bred of earth before we were bred of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend, or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.
— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.
— Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming," he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. "But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.Everett Ruess
— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest.
— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
When man will return to nature, nature will return to him.
— Grigoris Deoudis
To eat or be eaten, to escape or be taken...a matter of utmost importance to the one concerned, yet it happens all the time and we don't even notice.
— Nahoko Uehashi, Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit
I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am.I only regret not having loved you.Put your hands in mineAnd let’s be quiet, surrounded by life.
— Alberto Caeiro, O Pastor Amoroso
I'd rather be on the ground than underTo feel the heavy rain and the thunder.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual
I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night being born — but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence — a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance — that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.
— Richard Evelyn Byrd
Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.
— John Muir, The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures
... there's a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the Known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.
— Rob Schultheis, Fool's Gold: Lives, Loves, and Misadventures in the Four Corners Country
To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself.
— Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Leave the world in better conditions in wich you found it.
— Baden Powell
Their [cats] effortless passing between the wild and domestic worlds suggests the kind of grace we need as a species to move between nature and culture.
— Richard Mabey, Nature Cure
If you are in the mountains alone for some time, many days at minimum, & it helps if you are fasting. The forest grows tired of its weariness towards you; it resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. Near dusk the faces in tree bark cease hiding, and stare out at you. The welcoming ones and also the malevolent, open in their curiosity. In your camp at night you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then from the muddled voices in creek water, sometimes an entire sentence of deep import. The ghosts of animals reveal themselves to you without prejudice to your humanity. You see them receding before you as you walk the trail their shapes beautiful and sad.
— Charles Frazier
The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.
— Brian Morton, Breakable You
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment!
— Ellis Peters
The waters of the stream played the part of the orchestra, and the sunlight provided the dancers. Every now and then a crescendo of wind highlighted the symphony in the clearing by the creek.
— Edward Mooney Jr.
Somewhere between poetry and science, somewhere between heaven and earth, clairaudience is born. Clairaudience is the sweetest mystery any human being could ever experience. Fortunately, it is the most contagious, too. Most, if not all, of my students walk away with some level of clairaudience after spending three hours in one of my workshops.
— Amelia Kinkade, Straight from the Horse's Mouth: How to Talk to Animals and Get Answers
We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
For the sight of the angry weather saddens my soul and the sight of the town, sitting like a bereaved mother beneath layers of ice, oppresses my heart.
— Kahlil Gibran
All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind.
— John Lubbock
Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.
— N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Down the hill I went, and then,I forgot the ways of men,For night-scents, heady and damp and coolWakened ecstasy 
— Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow
Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.
— Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
...there were only fifteen thousand polar bears in the world, and five billion of me. To let one of them devour my all-too-common flesh would, if only slightly, help adjust the grievous imbalance.
— Lawrence Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North
It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
— Michel de Montaigne, Cannibales
Winter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome -- black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the waiting non-arms of a snake, / its tan beaded-bag skin / studded with black diamonds.Up it coiled to speak to me a eye level. / Imagine! that sleek finger / rising out of the land's palm / and coiling faster than a Hindu rope. / The thrill of a bull snake / startled in the morning / when the mesas lie pooled / in a custard of light / kept me bright than ball lightning all day.Praise leapt first to mind / before flight or danger, / praise that knows no half-truth, and pardons all.
— Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems
I live in an ocean of smell…
— Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.
— Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel)—a century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the same time, at a different level, it makes us more dependent on nature’s whims.
— Slavoj Žižek
All must pay the debt of nature.
— Annie Proulx, Barkskins
A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
— Thomas Hardy
Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder. 
— Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen And Her Art
I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open to the influences of nature. Receive new thoughts with hospitality. Let us advance.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child