Quotes about Nature

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

But I would have a darkness in my mind like the dark the dead calf makes for a time on the grass where he lies, and will make in the earth as he is carried down. May all dead things lie down in me and be at peace, as in the ground.

Shall we do without hope? Some days there will be none. But now to the dry and dead woods floor they come again, the first flowers of the year, the assembly of the faithful, the beautiful, wholly given to being.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

You think the winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.