c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty.
— Peter Heller, Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave
As the sun sinksIt casts that silver bridgeAcross the lake
— Richard L.  Ratliff
Flowers reconnect us to our own beautiful and unique essence as human beings. They wake up our positive qualities so that we feel them and they begin to emanate from us, just as each flower radiates its own unique quality.
— Katie Hess, Flowerevolution: Blooming into Your Full Potential with the Magic of Flowers
A little tranquil lake is more significant to my life than any big city in the world
— Munia Khan
Number ... should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature both without and within.
— Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time: Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics
Rain is the purest of natural happenings.
— Will Advise
This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light.
— John Hay, The Bird of Light
That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwest side of the drumlin. The swamp was probably a pond sixty years ago, but now in summer, unless you know your trees, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding woodlands. It is only in spring, when the groundwater levels are high, that the remnant of the ice sheet makes itself apparent. Then the waters rise around the trunks of the red maple trees and, after reaching a critical level, run down across the small meadow to the north of my house.
— John Hanson Mitchell, Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile
Bugs never bug my head. They are amazing. It is the activities of humans which actually bug me all the time.
— Munia Khan
I have felt that you have been able to assimilate these secrets into your life, and the truth which lies in the beauty of all things has passed into your souls. A mere knowledge of things can be had in a short enough time, but their spirit can only be acquired by centuries of training and self-control.
— Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
Sharks are the lions of the sea.They glamorize the oceanic glory.
— Munia Khan
Flowers magnetize us with their beauty and reflect back to us our own essence. Their qualities magnify positive aspects of ourselves. They serve as messengers to remind us of the preciousness of life at the most crucial times of our lives. Flowers are doing this for us all the time, and all we have to do is pay attention.
— Katie Hess, Flowerevolution: Blooming into Your Full Potential with the Magic of Flowers
When we destroy the fertile lands, we destroy our own good life!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm."How often already you've had to be told,Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.Dread fifty above more than fifty below."I have to be gone for a season or so.
— Robert Frost
Nature is a divine art.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When you look at nature, you see a hidden mystery that gives a special flavor to the photograph.
— Abbas Kiarostami
When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;— Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,And wholly and joyously blends them.
— Walt Whitman, Selected Poems
The divine arts; Humankind, Nature, Stars, Sun, Moon, Sea....!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There's something very enticing about an empty bench under a tree. And if it's facing a river, that's the bench for me.
— Joyce Rachelle
Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.
— Alan Bradley, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
The Golden Number is a mathematical definition of a proportional function which all of nature obeys, whether it be a mollusk shell, the leaves of plants, the proportions of the animal body, the human skeleton, or the ages of growth in man.
— R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Nature Word
Spring is the fountain of love for thirsty winter
— Munia Khan
This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.
— Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
Thus nature provides a system for proportioning the growth of plants that satisfies the three canons of architecture. All modules are isotropic and they are related to the whole structure of the plant through self-similar spirals proportioned by the golden mean.
— Jay Kappraff, Connections: The Geometric Bridge Between Art & Science
We having so much fun together!! 'through nature..through people..through religion...through culture..through friendship...we manage to learn something that lead to a better relationship among humans on earth (Ejump,2017)
— ejump - 2017
really need time with nature,book, and my cam; exhausted for the last few days- 2ne1:2012 state when you feel like there's no way out, love is the only way; i said when i feel like i cant write no more, read is the only way (Ejump, 2016)
— ejump - 2016
We are all like cells within the body of the Universe/ God—as are plants, animals, air, natural resources and everything down to a subatomic level. Like cells in a body, these expressions grow, create, divide, destroy, die and are reabsorbed into the Universe/God to create again.
— Russell Anthony Gibbs, The Principle of Oneness: A Practical Guide to Experiencing the Profound Unity of Everything
People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be.
— Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
Sun shines above making diamonds of lightTink-tinkling, tap dancing and bright.from Atlantic Ocean, My Old Friend by Mommy Moo Moo
— Mommy Moo Moo
Sun shines above making diamonds of lightTink-tinkling, tap dancing and bright.
— Mommy Moo Moo
Sun shines above making diamonds of lightTink-tinkling, tap dancing, and bright.
— Mommy Moo Moo
The massive spread of corporate controlled humans across the face of the Earth would be regarded as a parasitic growth by nature.
— Steven Magee
Corporate humans would be regarded as a cancerous growth on the Earth by nature.
— Steven Magee
If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.
— John McPhee, Coming into the Country
Connecting people with people, people with nature, and people with the earth.
— Mommy Moo Moo
To divine is to imagine the world rightly, to see past the illusion that we are separate from the entire fabric of reality.
— Gwendolyn Womack, The Fortune Teller
We therefore find that the triangles and rectangles herein described, enclose a large majority of the temples and cathedrals of the Greek and Gothic masters, for we have seen that the rectangle of the Egyptian triangle is a perfect generative medium, its ratio of five in width to eight in length 'encouraging impressions of contrast between horizontal and vertical lines' or spaces; and the same practically may be said of the Pythagorean triangle
— Samuel Colman, Harmonic Proportion and Form in Nature, Art and Architecture
I know I can't own a hilltop, a meadow, or a mountainside. But keeping it a secret somehow makes it mine.
— Joyce Rachelle
Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I adore the sky wearing rainbow shawl of love for the birds so that they could fly free in warmth after the storm
— Munia Khan
Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley On Love: Selected Writings
Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works.
— Richard Feynman, The Quotable Feynman
Enjoy the peace of Nature and declutter your inner world.
— Amit Ray, Mindfulness Living in the Moment - Living in the Breath
The Fibonacci Sequence turns out to be the key to understanding how nature designs... and is... a part of the same ubiquitous music of the spheres that builds harmony into atoms, molecules, crystals, shells, suns and galaxies and makes the Universe sing.
— Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life: An Exploration of Science and Philosophy
We biologists often use the phrase “Mother Nature” to refer to the entire system of Nature that we see around us, but it is not really an entity, and it does not have any real concern for any of its living creatures – it lives on with or without us; it is in our human psychology to impose a human-like identity upon any grand system that we encounter around us – it gives us a sense of closeness to that system and makes us feel an essential part of it. When I say, Mother Nature designed us, or programmed us, I am simply referring to the process of natural selection.
— Abhijit Naskar, Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy
Heaven is all around us. All we need is perception
—  to extol the melodies of Nature's orchestra.
In the physical constitution of an organized being, that is, a being adapted suitably to the purposes of life, we assume it as a fundamental principle that no organ for any purpose will be found but what is also the fittest and best adapted for that purpose. Now in a being which has reason and a will, if the proper object of nature were its conservation, its welfare, in a word, its happiness, then nature would have hit upon a very bad arrangement in selecting the reason of the creature to carry out this purpose. For all the actions which the creature has to perform with a view to this purpose, and the whole rule of its conduct, would be far more surely prescribed to it by instinct, and that end would have been attained thereby much more certainly that it ever can be by reason. Should reason have been communicated to this favored creature over and above, it must only have served it to contemplate the happy constitution of its nature, to admire it, to congratulate itself thereon, and to feel thankful for it to the beneficent cause, but not that it should subject its desires to that weak and delusive guidance, and meddle bunglingly with the purpose of nature. In a word, nature would have taken care that reason should not break forth into practical exercise, nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness and the means of attaining it. Nature would not only have taken on herself the choice of the ends but also of the means, and with wise foresight would have entrusted both to instinct.
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
If your prayers are not fertile, what are they? How do you make the Buddy System feminine? Pink is feminine.
— Charlotte Fairchild, Fertile Prayers: Daily Fertile Prayers
The moment you cross the border of your country to another, nature will blow you the breeze of revolution, no matter how long you may spend abroad, you will never return back home the same again, it is either greater or worse.
— Elijah Onyenmeriogu
Feature the good culture to never be like the vulture that doesn't have a good posture in the picture, the structure you make from every adventure gives glory to the creator for his creature, and he will give you treasure from the nature to venture for the future to be the victor.
— Elijah Onyenmeriogu
...[N]ature generally in the distribution of her capacities has adapted the means to the end... [so nature's] true destination must be to produce a will, not merely good as a means to something else, but good in itself, for which reason was... imparted to us as a practical... absolutely necessary... faculty.
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
You too can make the golden cut, relating the two poles of your being in perfect golden proportion, thus enabling the lower to resonate in tune with the higher, and the inner with the outer. In doing so, you will bring yourself to a point of total integration of all the separate parts of your being, and at the same time, you will bring yourself into resonance with the entire universe....Nonetheless the universe is divided on exactly these principles as proven by literally thousands of points of circumstantial evidence, including the size, orbital distances, orbital frequencies and other characteristics of planets in our solar system, many characteristics of the sub-atomic dimension such as the fine structure constant, the forms of many plants and the golden mean proportions of the human body, to mention just a few well known examples. However the circumstantial evidence is not that on which we rely, for we have the proof in front of us in the pure mathematical principles of the golden mean.
— Alison Charlotte Primrose, The Lamb Slain With A Golden Cut: Spiritual Enlightenment and the Golden Mean Revelation
Because life is robust,Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
Without the intense touch of nature, you can never fully freshen yourself! Go for a camping and there both your weary mind and your exhausted body will rise like a morning sun!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
We have this distinctly human concept of good and bad. Nature doesn't have that. It just is. I'm not comfortable with that. I'm not accepting of the fact that we live in a profoundly brutal world. I don't fully approve of the way nature works. This lifetime of study has left me disappointed by the brutality of it all.It has also made me more sympathetic to the human condition and the many unbearable circumstances we find ourselves in. You and I are lucky in this part of the world not to experience the sort of wretched life that is a reality for so many.
— Joe Hutto
...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.
— Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping
Such was the hidden power of nature, capable of producing extreme beauty and cruelty at the same time.
— Kenneth Eade, Political Thriller: Unwanted, an American Assassin Story: an assassination, vigilante justice and terrorism thriller
The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.
— Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo
(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
The notion that human life has greater value than any other form of life is both unjustifiable and arrogant.
— Wei Wu Wei
The arbutus is now open everywhere in the woods and groves. How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year! If the blossoms were liable to change–if they were to become capricious and irregular–they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less; they might be just as bright, and gay, and fragrant under other forms, but they would not be the violets, and squirrel-cups, and ground laurels we loved last year. Whatever your roving fancies may say, there is a virtue in constancy which has a reward above all that fickle change can bestow, giving strength and purity to every affection of life, and even throwing additional grace about the flowers which bloom in our native fields. We admire the strange and brilliant plant of the green-house, but we love most the simple flowers we have loved of old, which have bloomed many a spring, through rain and sunshine, on our native soil.
— Susan Fenimore Cooper
The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time.
— Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira
The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace.
— James Rozoff
Stand in nature before anyone else has woken and most people find something to believe in.
— Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.
— Alan W. Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way
Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.
— Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration
If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.
— John Connolly, A Game of Ghosts
May the stars guide you. May the winds cleanse all ills and remain at your back. May the earth protect you and give you strength. May fire guard you, and rain refresh you, may all nature be your friend until we meet again in this place.
— Elizabeth Haydon, The Merchant Emperor
Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.
— U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti
Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they’ll go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness.
— Rebecca McNutt, Listen is Silent, or The Usurer
Trees exhale for us so that we can inhale them to stay alive. Can we ever forget that? Let us love trees with every breath we take until we perish
— Munia Khan
As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here— we’re not put on earth— to shape it anyway we want... You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say, “Well, what’s the use of a cloud? What’s the use of a river? What’s the use of a tree?” They don’t make anything happen.
— Derek Walcott
Yesterday morning, I awoke to a brilliant rainbow. At first, I marveled at the sky’s pink hues, and I thought how soothing it was. I haven’t had that feeling in a long time, that feeling of being at peace with myself or my life. I got out of bed to stand to pull the obligatory curtain further, the color peeking through the leaves of the oaks outside my window. Where I had been seeing grey for quite some time shone now pink. The color is hard to describe accurately. It was pink; but it bordered on a light red. It told me to come look at it.
— R.B. O'Brien
No one lives in these regionsof rock and sun. It is a lucky part of the world; to grow old without buildings and roadways, to dissolve quietly without feeling stunned.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Red Suitcase
I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed... or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city's space.
— Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture
I have seen travel plans happen only when they were made overnight.
— Sanhita Baruah
And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, “natural” in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don’t want it.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
I am selfish by habit, but sacrificial by nature. Therefore, I’d be wise to develop the habit of following my nature.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
The spirit of the wild must pass to all of you now. You must tell each one you meet: if you would find Pan, take up Pan's spirit. Remake the wild, a little at a time, each in your own corner of the world. You cannot wait for anyone else, even a god, to do that for you.
— Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
...there are no new themes for a writer, only new ways of setting down old themes, new eyes to wander among old rocks.
— Jim Crumley, Gulfs of Blue Air: A Highland Journey
The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.
— U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti
Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
It is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me – I am only a channel – I can imagine in many instances where I would become sinister to you.For instance, if life had led you to take up an artificial attitude, then you wouldn't be able to stand me, because I ama natural being.By my very presence I crystallize; I am a ferment.The unconscious of people who live in an artificial manner senses me as a danger.Everything about me irritates them, my way of speaking, my way of laughing.They sense nature.
— C.G. Jung
It is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me – I am only a channel – I can imagine in many instances where I would become sinister to you.For instance, if life had led you to take up an artificial attitude, then you wouldn't be able to stand me, because I am a natural being.By my very presence I crystallize; I am a ferment.The unconscious of people who live in an artificial manner senses me as a danger.Everything about me irritates them, my way of speaking, my way of laughing.They sense nature.
— C.G. Jung
Destination is a primordial intention born in the mind of the creator that promoted him to create a certain object of inanimate nature, animate nature and the highest creature, a human being
— Sunday Adelaja
All churches are an echo of this—the Cathedral of Nature.
— Seth Adam Smith, Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
If in the place of God we write “Reality”, “Nature”, “Unknowable”, or “Zero”, it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.
— J.F.C. Fuller
If men would understand and appreciate the good efforts that went into creation and how beautiful, good and awesome the creations were at the beginning, they would never think of undermining the Creators effort and integrity by destroying the beauty of nature! God is watching us!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.
— John Fowles, The Tree
We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.
— John Fowles, The Tree
Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.
— John Fowles, The Tree
Most of what is now “bitter” for our old nature is going to be useful for our nature
— Sunday Adelaja
Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
There is a god in man, and in nature. He, who sits in the dark, is the bringer of light. This beauty, the sign of an open eye.
— Gorgoroth
The Alchemical world view, in stark contrast to the scientific world view, where rational deterministic man is completely separated from both Nature and the Self, in fact the Self does not even exist. In the alchemical world view, all three are inextricably woven together and in "synchronistic" or "archetypal" events & occurrences in one's life, all distinctions between them blur and almost disappear.
— Craig Nelson
Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there.
— Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds
The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.
— Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
Language is fossil poetry
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?
— Norman MacCaig
Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him--Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
...the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent.
— Paulo Coelho
One good, compassionate and caring Self is a thousand times greater than all the fanciful, imaginary supernatural entities in the world.
— Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas
I send thee, love, this upland flower I foundWhile wandering lonely with o'erclouded heart,Hid in a grey recess of rocky groundAmong the misty mountains far apart;And then I heard the wild wind's luring soundWhich whoso trusts, is healed of earthborn care,And watched the lofty ridges loom around,Yet yearned in vain their secret faith to share.When lo! the sudden sunlight, sparkling keen,Poured full upon the vales this glorious day,And bared the abiding mountain-tops serene,And swept the shifting vapour-wreaths away:Then with the hills' true heart my heart beat true,Heavens opened, cloud-thoughts vanished, and I knew.
— Henry Stephens Salt, On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell
We were silent, tired, and happy, and it was pure hygge.
— Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well
Civilization has provided no peace, no spectacle, no assurance to the human heart which can transcend the simple, ever-changing, matchless beauty and peace of the natural world
— Harvey Broome, Out Under The Sky Of The Great Smokies
But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.
— Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming
None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt.
— Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Don't become so materialistic and mechanized that one day you stop believing in God's created nature and the natural beauty,Enjoy god gifted natural beauty to the fullest as you have only one LIFE!!!
— Santosh Adbhut Kumar
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.
— Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861
It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.
— Iris Murdoch
There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she hated nature sometimes.
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
For I have learnedTo look on nature, not as in the hourOf thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimesThe still, sad music of humanity,Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample powerTo chasten and subdue. And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woods,And mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye, and ear,—both what they half create,And what perceive; well pleased to recogniseIn nature and the language of the sense,The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being.
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,This is no common waste, no common gloom;But Nature, in due course of time, once moreShall here put on her beauty and her bloom.She leaves these objects to a slow decay,That what we are, and have been, may be known;But at the coming of the milder day,These monuments shall all be overgrown.
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
I heard a thousand blended notesWhile in a grove I sate reclined,In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughtsBring sad thoughts to the mind.To her fair works did Nature linkThe human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to thinkWhat man has made of man.
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
I know not how such things can be;I only know there came to meA fragrance such as never clingsTo aught save happy living things;A sound as of some joyous elfSinging sweet songs to please himself,And, through and over everything,A sense of glad awakening.The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,Whispering to me I could hear;I felt the rain’s cool finger-tipsBrushed tenderly across my lips,Laid gently on my sealed sight,And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see!—A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell,—I know not how such things can be!—I breathed my soul back into me.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
The nature of the kingdom must make you a God-carrier
— Sunday Adelaja
Lie down beside these watersThat bubble from the spring;Hear in the desert silenceThe desert sparrow sing;Draw from the shapeless momentSuch pattern as you can;And cleave henceforth to Beauty;Expect no more from man.Man, with his ready answer,His sad and hearty word,For every cause in limbo,For every debt deferred,For every pledge forgotten,His eloquent and grimDeep empty gaze upon you,—Expect no more from him.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
Love is the nature of who God is
— Sunday Adelaja
We both loved the birds and animals and plants. We both felt far happier out of doors. I felt a peace in nature that I could never find in the human world, as you know.
— Tracy Rees, Amy Snow
The nature of the kingdom must mature within you
— Sunday Adelaja
The love of God is the nature of the kingdom
— Sunday Adelaja
As a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature.
— Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
Jesus doesn't bring anything up from the wells of human nature--He brings them down from above.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
Uniqueness is like a signature, nobody can forge it's exact copy.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Let your teaching reveal the nature of the kingdom of God
— Sunday Adelaja
To suffer destructive consequences is to obey laws in human nature
— Sunday Adelaja
Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.
— Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters: Stories
I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appeared on her front porch before setting off to extract these mute delicate coins from their settings in the sand. At first, we had collected only the larger specimens, but gradually as we learned what was rare and to be truly prized, we began to gather only the smallest sand dollars for our collection. Our trophies were sometimes as small as thumbnails and as fragile as contact lenses. Annie Kate collected the tiniest relics, round and cruciform and white as bone china when dried of sea water, and placed them in a glass-and-copper cricket box in her bedroom. Often we would sit together and admire the modest splendor of our accumulation. At times it looked like the coinage of a shy, diminutive species of angel. Our quest to find the smallest sand dollar became a competition between us, and as the months passed and Annie Kate grew larger with the child, the brittle, desiccated animals we unearthed from the sand became smaller and smaller. It was all a matter of training the eye to expect less.
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
It was in her garden that whatever physical grace Abigail St. Croix possessed asserted itself. She moved among her flowers with consummate natural fluidity, enjoying the incommunicable pleasures of growing things with the patience and concentration of a watchmaker. In this, her small, green country, surrounded by an embrasure of old Charleston brick, there were camellias of distinction, eight discrete varieties of azaleas, and a host of other flowers, but she directed her prime attention to the growing of roses. She had taught me to love flowers since I had known her; I had learned that each variety had its own special personality, its own distinctive and individual way of presenting itself to the world. She told me of the shyness of columbine, the aggression of ivy, and the diseases that affected gardenias. Some flowers were arrogant invaders and would overrun the entire garden if allowed too much freedom. Some were so diffident and fearful that in their fragile reticence often lived the truest, most infinitely prized beauty. She spoke to her flowers unconsciously as we made our way to the roses in the rear of the garden. “You can learn a lot from raising roses, Will. I’ve always told you that.” “I’ve never raised a good weed, Abigail. I could kill kudzu.”“Then one part of your life is empty,” she declared. “There’s a part of the spirit that’s not being fed.
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
To demonstrate the nature of one who would enter the kingdom is to use an illustration
— Sunday Adelaja
I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
— Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays