c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There are certain prejudices attached to the human mind which it requires all our wisdom to keep from interfering with our happiness; certain set notions, acquired in infancy, and cherished involuntarily by age, which grow up and assume a gloss so plausible, that few minds, in what is called a civilized country, can afterwards overcome them. Truth is often perverted by education. While the refined Europeans boast a standard of honour, and a sublimity of virtue, which often leads them from pleasure to misery, and from nature to error, the simple, uninformed American follows the impulse of his heart, and obeys the inspiration of wisdom.Nature, uncontaminated by false refinement, every where acts alike in the great occurrences of life. The Indian discovers his friend to be perfidious, and he kills him; the wild Asiatic does the same; the Turk, when ambition fires, or revenge provokes, gratifies his passion at the expence of life, and does not call it murder. Even the polished Italian, distracted by jealousy, or tempted by a strong circumstance of advantage, draws his stiletto, and accomplishes his purpose. It is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from the prejudices of country, or of education… Self-preservation is the great law of nature; when a reptile hurts us, or an animal of prey threatens us, we think no farther, but endeavour to annihilate it. When my life, or what may be essential to my life, requires the sacrifice of another, or even if some passion, wholly unconquerable, requires it, I should be a madman to hesitate.
— Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest
...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91]
— Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
There are many paths leading to a garden and many experiences awaiting those who venture in. No matter what your motive—whether to grow healthy, delicious food; spend time outdoors feeling more alive than your desk job allows; help save the planet; find relaxation, solace, or healing; meet your neighbors; get your hands in the sweet earth; or discover for yourself just how abundant and generous nature can be—a garden rarely disappoints. It’s a magnet for life in all its quirky, beautiful forms.
— Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener's Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West
Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. "Anemone," he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. "Find me a silk to match that.
— Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin
A few blossoms float into the room. They drop like frayed yellow ribbons on the gray carpet.
— Eileen Granfors
Have you ever been in a large forest and seen a strange black tarn hidden deep among the leaves? It looks bewitched and a little frightening. All is still — fir trees and pines huddle close and silent on all sides. Sometimes the trees bend cautiously and shyly over the water as if they are wondering what may be hidden in the dark depths. There is another forest growing in the water, and it, too, is full of wonder and stillness. Strangest of all, never have the two forests been able to speak to each other.By the edge of the pool and out in the water are soft tussocks covered with brown bear moss and wooly white cottongrass. All is so quiet — not a sound, not a flutter of life, not a trembling breath — all of nature seems to be holding its breath listening, listening with beating heart: soon, soon.
— Helge Kjellin, Great Swedish Fairy Tales
The garden has wrapped itself in autumn haze. An unusual autumn, lacking that thrill of vegetal warmth when the sap is still alive and holds up the trees, drunk on solar gold. It is the sorrowful climax of a summer's drought. Never before was I so struck by the cancerous emaciation in a garden. The leaves started turning yellow in July and began falling, like a dance of prematurely withered bodies.
— Emil Dorian, Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944
It was early autumn, then, before the snow began to fly. –(There’s an expression for you, born in the country, born from the imaginations of men and their feeling for the right word, the only word, to mirror clearly what they see! Those with few words must know how to use them.) Men who have seen it, who have watched it day by day outside their cabin window coming down from the sky, like the visible remorse of an ageing year; who have watched it bead upon the ears of the horses they rode, muffle the sound of hoofs on the trail, lie upon spruce boughs and over grass – cover, as if forever, the landscape in which they moved, round off the mountains, blanket the ice in the rivers – for them the snow flies. The snow doesn’t fall. It may ride the wind. It may descend slowly, in utter quiet, from the grey and laden clouds, so that you can hear the flakes touching lightly on the wide white waste, as they come to rest at the end of their flight. Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.
— Howard O'Hagan, Tay John
Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.
— Jess Winfield, My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare
The writer Richard Manning has argued that 'the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.
— Phillip Connors
It is with eight lengthy legs we use to catch food, balance and knit a beautiful silk bed,but as babies we had lost our bones and skin, and hence our legs we had shed.
— Jasmine Jean, Whimsy Girl
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
— Richard   Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.
— Edmund Burke, The Letters on a Regicide Peace
A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation.
— Dean Koontz, Cold Fire
Spiders don't chew. They send a special liquid into their prey. The prey's insides turn to mush. Then the spider sucks up its tasty lunch!
— Julie  Murphy, Arachnids
The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh.
— Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness
Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan's mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Nature seems to welcome defiance of conventions, and to say, with a smile, 'So, the truant has come back again!' ("Absolute Evil")
— Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Insect life was so loud that when you parked the car and got out it sounded as if you had suddenly tuned into a radio frequency from another planet.
— David Samuels
A male frigate bird blows up a wild red pouch on his neck. He can keep it puffed up for hours. It is his way of impressing the girls.
— Julie  Murphy, Seabirds
In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species? We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem.
— John Hay, A Beginner's Faith in Things Unseen
Nature abhors a virgin - a frozen asset.
— Clare Boothe Luce
Future warns us through current symptoms in nature.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But--on the top of that--he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it.
— Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.
— Joy Williams, Ill Nature
Rain is Nature's way of telling us to go slowly because the roads will soon be wet.
— Hermester Barrington
Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.
— Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
The world moves fast, and so do the bees. Can we find the stillness to see them?
— Hattie Ellis
all nature is at war
— Alphonse Pyrame de Candolle
I know that men are so eager to be one among the stars.I feel that damaged earth will never let men go off hand.
— Toba Beta
Come ye viewless ministers of this dread hour! Come from the fenny lake, the hanging rock, and the midnight cave! The moon is red – the stars are out – the sky is burning – and all nature stands aghast at what we do!
— William Mudford
What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.
— Henry David Thoreau
It is a great mistake to say ”Conquer it,” for we can never conquer nature; we can only harmonize with it.
— Gyomay M. Kubose, Everyday Suchness: Buddhist Essays on Everyday Living
If we are here for any good purpose at all (other than collating texts, running rivers, and learning the stars), I suppose it is to entertain the rest of nature. A gang of sexy primate clowns. All the little critters creep in close to listen when the human beings are in a good mood and willing to play some tunes.
— Gary Snyder, Practice of the Wild
Czechs simply don’t say they’re going camping or spending time outdoors. They say, in Czech, that they are going “into the nature” as though nature, příroda, is beyond a place in the woods or other forms of terrain, that nature was a state of mind and had the ability to reverse the crippling, chaotic aspects of life.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Nature cannot be bribed, when the necessary conditions are not met, it does not happen
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
It’s natural for people to feel superior to those under them. It requires a conscious effort to value those less fortunate than you are.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
...Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind. While the touch of Nature’s art Harmonizes heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— “I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;...Awake! arise! And come away! To the wild woods and the plains, And the pools where winter rains Image all their roof of leaves, Where the pine its garland weaves Of sapless green, and ivy dun Round stems that never kiss the sun: Where the lawns and pastures be, And the sandhills of the sea:— Where the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets, And wind-flowers, and violets, Which yet join not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
The ripen fruit is for a sacred season.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The Sun is the light of the day.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It's not worth it to build castles on the sand if they get destroyed by the waves of reality.
— Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Vesnici oluje
The moon was barely visible behind the pillows of clouds. Overhead, the lights caught the drizzle in a slow-motion light show.
— Duncan B Barlow, The City, Awake
Rockface sheer and imposing, emerges from the sea, reminding us nature makes no allowances.
— Marcia Meier, Ireland, Place Out of Time
To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson—all else will come.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
Nature tells the truth as it is
—  it has no euphemism
How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are.-Laurance S. Rockefeller
— Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man developed his sense of dependence on—and respect for—the natural environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed obscured nature's role in human experience—hiding the sun with a pall of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the earth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on the natural world became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks, monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) into the natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of all sensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unity with nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally inanimate, totally synthetic—a purely inorganic physical milieu that promoted the deanimization of man and his thought.
— Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
The sight of a worm excites my reverence more than all the gods men have invented.
— Marty Rubin
The true order is what the wind creates by scattering the leaves.
— Marty Rubin
Even the faded flower denies nothingness.
— Marty Rubin
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
— Hellen Keller
There are 200,000 species of fly alone. So the void, the emptiness, must be in you.
— Marty Rubin
Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.
— C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis
It's incredible how nature sets females up to take care of people, and yet it is tricky for them to take care of themselves.
— Björk
Nature is as uniform as variant.
— Mahrukh
Later that afternoon, the girls sat on the porch, bored and worried. It was good that they didn't find any dead bats, but why didn't they? Was Tyler right - did the bats fly higher when it was windier? Was it because they could avoid the turbine easier when it was spinning faster? That didn't make sense.
— Pamela McDowell, Bats in Trouble
Humans are a terrestrial species biased toward attributing the forces we see around us to familiar forces on land. But the more we look, the more we learn that everything arises from the sea and everything falls away to the sea, and the deep blue home is home to every one of us, whether we are beings of water, air, rock, ice, or soil.
— Julia Whitty, Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean
Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.
— Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
You must, in studying Nature, always consider both each single thing and the whole: nothing is inside and nothing is outside, for what is within is without. Make haste, then, to grasp this holy mystery which is public knowledge.Rejoice in the true illusion, in the serious game: no living thing is a unity, it is always manifold.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Selected Poetry
Nature has no beauty forbiddenManmade concrete slab: guilt-riddenWings or leaves whatever we may careThose limbs with the birds only trees will share
— Munia Khan
One of humankind's most enduring misconceptions is that of nature's bounty... the belief that nature is such a powerful force that it is indestructible.
— Mark Kurlansky, World Without  Fish
We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
The power of nature is stronger than anything.
— Mahrukh
Dance is the art closest to nature.
— Marty Rubin
When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is—the sense of the supernatural in nature.
— William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago
Blessed be, it's finally Spring. In joy and delight the birds sing, Ravished upon the entire earth, The new rebirth, Helas, the joy it brings!
— Ana Claudia Antunes, ACross Tic
Fallen leaves on the ground are the golden song of immortal creativity.
— Amit Ray, Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity
And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
The old woman took her hand, kissed it, and went back home in tears. The sky, pale in the east, still burned over Monte, as if the whole day's splendor was concentrated up there. ... She only saw that great light, that boundless, deep, infinite, mirage.
— Grazia Deledda, Reeds in the Wind
Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings.
— Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast
The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot.Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
— Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Nothing in nature is that even
—  man is the inventor of straight edges.
Humans need to learn the lesson of acceptance when things seem to go awry, know that this is only temporary, your flow of good is assured with acceptance, gratefulness, love and joy. - fairy quote
— Sarah Rajkotwala, The Year of Talking to Plants: The Plants and Fairies Talk in Their Own Words
The state of coastal waters reflects the nature of souls that surround it.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
On a personal level, I chose not to look at the eclipse but rather sat outside during it and listened and appreciated nature, instead of participating in it like a pop festival. My decision was based partly on belief but also I have to contemplate the mass production of glasses and how they will only be used once, polluting our earth with plastics and harmful metals.
— Lorin Morgan-Richards
If you are not filled with overflowing love, compassion and goodwill for all creatures living wild in nature, You will never know true happiness.
— Paul Oxton
This is the simplest of spells, and foundation to all others. Magic seeks to better understand, and eventually to build on, the connection between minds and bodies. Even to calm a storm, you treat the wind and rain as if they were alive and corporeal. That is why blood is part of the spell, along with words and symbols.
— Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide
No matter how few possessions you own or how little money you have, loving wildlife and nature will make you rich beyond measure.
— Paul Oxton
The future of wildlife and the habitat that they depend on is in being destroyed. It is time to make nature and all the beauty living within it our priority.
— Paul Oxton
Humanity can no longer stand by in silence while our wildlife are being used, abused and exploited.It is time we all stand together, to be the voice of the voiceless before it's too late. Extinction means forever.
— Paul Oxton
What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.
— Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
It seems supernatural, but only because it is not understood.
— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
A river flow freely from its source.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
In Summer there were white and damask roses, and the smell of thyme and musk. In Spring there were green gooseberries and throstles [thrush], and the flowers they call ceninen [daffodils]. And leeks and cabbages also grew in that garden; and between long straight alleys, and apple-trained espaliers, there were beds of strawberries, and mint, and sage.
— Beatrix Potter
Is there anything whiter than winter snow?
— Laiah Gifty Akita
White clouds, blue sky.
— Laiah Gifty Akita
Protecting our environment is not a luxury we can choose to enjoy, but a simple matter of survival.
— Auliq-Ice
We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
— David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
It must be difficult to be a mother,” she continued thoughtfully. “To create and nurture and raise a tiny person, to invest all of your heart in it, only to have them grow up and not need you anymore. It must hurt to feel that kind of abandonment. To be forced to let go because of time and nature and the well-being of… both the child and the mother, I suppose?
— Eda J. Vor, Lay Her Ghosts to Rest
Around them, sky and air wove the ancient song of the meeting place of earth and sea—wave-rush on the shore, gulls mewing and sobbing. No more bells, except a last dying peal from Fara.
— Harper Fox, Brothers of the Wild North Sea
What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination.
— Rebecca Solnit
The time of man is coming, and of this I am certain: neither death, nor life, nor the spirits, nor the present, nor the future, nor the stars, nor the abyss, nor any creature: nothing will keep from love those who live in our land, and by our land. The time of man is coming─men who will know the nobility of forests and the grace of trees, men who will know how to contemplate and heal and, lastly, how to love.
— Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves
The entire area - some 300 square kilometers - is sacred. There are shrines and temples dotted about the slopes, but they merely confirm the sanctity of the land. It is not in the shrines and temples that the gods live, but in the mountains themselves. [about the Three Holy Mountains of Dewa - Haguro, Gassam, and Yodono]
— Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan
The diversity of different colours is displayed in a rainbow.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Rainbow the blend of bliss of colours!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
To save our dying earth, any government which is not environmentalist must go because on earth there are thousands of governments but there in only one earth! Continuing with the eco-traitor stupid governments means an environmental suicide! Enemies of nature are real barbarians and there is no place for these savages in our civilisation!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
..So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 1 Corinthians 3:7
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn't and wouldn't quit.
— Ben Montgomery, Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
A cat is a cat.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
She sketched songbirds when she was supposed to be minding her lessons, and she sketched church mice when she was meant to be at prayer. When she had time to ramble out of doors, anything in Nature was fair game- from the shoots of clover between her toes to any cloud that meandered overhead.
— Tessa Dare, When a Scot Ties the Knot
A dam is monumentally static; it tries to bring a river under control, to regulate its seasonal pattern of floods and low flow.
— Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams: Enlarged and Updated Edition
Underlying many aspects of water development is a myth: the myth that we must have more.
— Tim Palmer, Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement
Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
I've always longed to have a patch of personal wilderness. Of waist-high grass entwined with wildflowers through which I can prance
—  within which I can lie down and disappear from sight.
I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
I sit down by the river.Its incessant flow has polished the rocks carried from the top of the mountain. The aqueous caress, that has unrolled for millions of years the liquid ribbon from the summits towards the plains, keeps the freshness of the youth.The July sun heats the trees on the shore, while the stream of water refreshes the air; Two breaths which mingle without opposing one another. The foliage softly sways under the summer breeze, tuning its movement to that of the fiery wave.Won by a palpable peace, thank you Mother Nature, I dive into my book.A time later, which seems infinite to me, the sky becomes darker, I raise my head.How many hours have passed during which, indifferent to the human time, the cascading water has descended from the mountain? How much water has passed in front of me? How many beings have quenched their thirst there, and get their lives out from it?How long after my small passage on Earth will have been forgotten, the river will continue to flow, to carry its rocks, to erode the mountain until it becomes a plain, to spread life like a vein of the Earth ?
— Gabrielle Dubois
Trees are where Nature has simply begun
— Will Advise
If the root is holy, the branches shall be holy.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
— Gustave Flaubert
Whales feel cohesion, a sense of community, of loyalty. The distress call of a lone whale is enough to prompt its entire pod to rush to its side- a gesture that lands them nose to nose in the same sand. It's a fatal symphony of echolocation, a siren call to the sympathetic.
— Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
Nature can counsel nothing but crime.
— Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
the nature need the evil for existence
— faamin
Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.
— Michael Ondaatje
The mirror reflect what it sees. So state of our waterbodies, shows our own nature.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
All things can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as in nature walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
I love the forest.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I like nature and I enjoy walking through the forest admiring its beauty and breathing not just the fresh air but, also the quietness and peacefulness of the place. There I feel serene. I feel I am accepted just the way I am whenever I arrive and for as long as I stay. Yes, there it doesn’t matter how I look, what country I come from, if I am from rich or poor family, what is my education, income, religion, sexual orientation and color of skin. It doesn’t even care if my hair looks messy and whether I wear the latest fashion cloths.
— Nico J. Genes
The root system supports the branches.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A tree house, to me, is the most royal palace in the world
— Munia Khan
Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years.
— Stephen King, Joyland
A lamb among wolves!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A sheep in wolves clothing!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Some call me nature, others call me Mother Nature. ... How you choose to live each day, whether you regard me or disregard me, doesn't really matter to me. One way or other, your actions will determine your fate, not mine. I am nature. I will go on. I am prepared to evolve. Are you?
— Conservation International
To Tree’s surprise, e could still feel the blade of Univervia that was on the deer’s tongue. And the feelings that came at Tree were fast, intense and surprising. The whole blade lay languid, surrendering as the tongue mashed the strands of grass up to the roof of the doe’s mouth. Then the deer twisted the grass sideways and ground teeth into the grass. As the grass was destroyed, each cell popped and gave shots of grass life-force into the hungry deer, in little pops of ecstatic release. The whole thing happened as swiftly as a string of firecrackers going off into light and smoke, leaving behind a dull residue that gave no sense of the evanescent beauty that had been enchanting the air only moments before. Tree felt this chunk of Univervia embrace willful dissolution and then suddenly all these little pieces that had been integrated into Univervia were separated into something like ananda, the joy which powers the universe and then... then the grass was deer.
— Melina Sempill Watts, Tree
A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of the natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline. All those Autumn weeks I have watched the great disk going south along the horizon of moorlands beyond the marsh, now sinking behind this field, now behind this leafless tree, now behind this sedgy hillock dappled with thin snow. We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy and awe of it, not to share in it, isw to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Mankind does not have dominion over the Earth, mankind has a relationship with the Earth.
— J.Adam Snyder
When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
I stood like Adam in his lonely gardenOn that first morning, shaken out of sleep,Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
— Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: the earth does not belong to man - man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood that unites one's family. All things are connected.
— Chief Seattle (Sealth), Suquamish Chief
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers
— Claude Monet
When we are surrounded by such diversity - in nature, in culture, in human spirit - how can we stand not to acknowledge it?
— C. N. Lester
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The hawk turned slowly and flexed his great wings to maintain his height. In this cold wind, he flew merely to see and to travel. Gone was the exhilaration of fast-rising summer air carrying him so high into the sky's blue vacuum that the pond became a silver speck and the great southern lake dazzled him with a glaring slash of reflected sun.
— Franklin Russell, Watchers at the Pond
O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The trout is still with me, as are my memories. The future is somewhere between these two forces, but it lives in mystery. The river records to trail behind or before me, and covers everything as it flows. This mountain and this river are old, yet as I wade alone, they both appear young and new to me.
— Daniel J. Rice, The Unpeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness
At the top, I put the camera's viewfinder to my eye and slowly turned, the way my grandmother had taught me. From every vantage point something remarkable filled the screen- clusters of wild red columbine, fallen boulders forming geometric designs against the wall, crusty green lichen gnawing on rocks, a Baltimore oriole popping from a thicket of brush, and, at my feet, a grasshopper clinging to a stem of purple aster. I could spend a day here and barely scratch the surface. The sun felt warm on my shoulders as I bent down to capture the blossoms of yellow star grass, the feathery purple petals of spotted knapweed, and the lacy wings of two yellow jackets as they alighted on tiny white blossoms of Labrador tea. By the time I finished taking photos of a monarch butterfly resting on milkweed, I realized an hour had passed.
— Mary Simses, The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe
So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, all of these laws are not specially pleasing to us. But there is laws nonetheless. Like when a tiger pounce on a monkey in the jungle - bad for the money, but good for the tiger. That is just the way it is.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
There is a tender breeze Wafting around hereFeel it from your Soul You will see Magic over hereDid I just now hear a beautiful symphony over here ?Or is it just your soothing words murmuring in my ear?Is it the cute mynah bird on my shoulder?Or is it your soft head nestling that I feel so tender? There is a tender breeze Wafting around hereFeel it from your SoulYou will see Magic over here...Did I just now hear the nightingale sing around here?Or is it the breeze whispering softly to the trees near?Is that you giggling away to glory? Or is that just the flowers mingling with the bees and telling their story?There is a tender breeze Wafting around hereFeel it from your SoulYou will see Magic over here..
— Avijeet Das
Wildness is not found but revealed.
— Paul Gruchow, Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild
If you are lucky you will have the opportunity in your life to be owned by a good piece of land.
— Daniel J. Rice
There, on the far side of of the Atlantic, would be Maine, but despite the shared ocean, her island and this one were worlds apart. Where Inishmaan was gray and brown, its fragile man-made soil supporting only the hardiest of low-growing plants, the fertile Quinnipeague invited tall pines in droves, not to mention vegetables, flowers, and improbable, irrepressible herbs. Lifting her head, eyes closed now, she breathed in the damp Irish air and the bit of wood smoke that drifted on the cold ocean wind. Quinnipeague smelled of wood smoke, too, since early mornings there could be chilly, even in summer. But the wood smoke would clear by noon, giving way to the smell of lavender, balsam, and grass. If the winds were from the west, there would be fry smells from the Chowder House; if from the south, the earthiness of the clam flats; if from the northeast, the purity of sweet salt air.
— Barbara Delinsky, Sweet Salt Air
What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe." -Luther Burbank.
— Susan Wiggs, The Apple Orchard
I'll tell you a story, far, far from here where blades of grass are fluent in sentient knowledge and trees are a mandala of prayer.
— Carolyn Riker, Blue Clouds: A Collection of Soul’s Creative Intelligence
But I would point out that there is another and still more important function of great mountains - the culture not of athletic faculty alone, but of that intellectual sympathy with untamed and primitive Nature which our civilization threatens to destroy. A mountain is something more than a thing to climb. To the many who, on a fine summer day, swarm up Skiddaw or Snowdon by the well-worn pony-paths, it is pure holiday-making; to the few who (in another sense) swarm up Scafell Pinnacel or the Napes needle, it is pure gymnastics; but between or beyond these two classes there are those - pilgrims I call them - who find mountain climbing what only mountains can give, the contact with unsophisticated Nature, the opportunity to be alone, to be out of and above the world of ordinary life, to pass from the familiar sights and surroundings into a cloudland of new shapes and sounds, where one feels the fascination of that undiscoverable secret (I do not know how else to name it) by which every true nature-lover is allured.
— Salt, Henry S.
By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,From there the wind comes and blows over the world,By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,From there the clouds come and rain falls over the world.
— Jane Bierhorst, In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations
In time of rain I come:I can sing among the flowers:I utter my song: my heart is glad.Water of flowers foams over the earth:My heart was intoxicated.
— Jane Bierhorst, In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations
If there is something that I have learned from my time on this planet of ours, something that I can share and that I know to be true, it’s that we disconnect ourselves from nature and the wilderness too many times. Our birthplace. Our home.
— Jellis Vaes
There is a whole world out there, waiting for you. A world filled with opportunities wherever and whenever you want to grasp them. And whether you do or you don’t…. well that is totally up to you.
— Jellis Vaes
The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.
— John Darnielle, Universal Harvester
I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling—a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
If you feel unhappy, sick or depressed, spend more time in nature and you will come to see the colors of life, you’ll come to experience the amazing changes that this world can do for you. The wonder of the purest and most honest beauty there is, one that is not here to define anyone or anything, but simply to let you see why this life is so worth living.
— Jellis Vaes
It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.
— Oscar Wilde
In the natural equation (Natural Society) freedom, is but the only element of equality commonly shared by all species".
— -Daryavesh Rothmensch
the sanctity of life always takes precedence over the quality of life...For life defines what is the definitive intrinsic attribute, of that which is the natural order of things...While the later, is an incidental ingredient of that concatenation.
— -Daryavesh Rothmensch
Catching fish is secondary to the immeasurable joys of the watery world.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
Seek a slower, simpler life.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
Be seasonal, ethical and gentle.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
I’m likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
The sunlight, penetrating the gaps in the tall trees, plays chess on the gravestones, shifting slowly and thoughtfully across the worn old stones. The wind, like a hundred violins, plays perpetually in the topmost branches of the deodars.
— Ruskin Bond, The Lamp is Lit: Leaves from a Journal