Quotes about Nature

Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

It seemed like a garden where no frost could wither or rough wind blow--a garden remembering a hundred vanished summers." ? L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

As I stood alone and forsaken, and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my own nothingness, and on the other hand, the sure flight of the birds recalled the words spoken by Christ: Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite in friendship.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. For instance, the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar; perhaps in turn it can forget that it was a butterfly so completely that it can become a fish. The

I am by nature so polemically constituted that I only feel myself really in my element when I am surrounded by human mediocrity and paltriness.

Mine': what does this word mean? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to, what contains my whole being, which is mine only so far as I belong to it. My God is not the God that belongs to me, but the God to whom I belong; and so, too, when I say my native land, my home, my calling, my longing, my hope. If there had been no immortality before, this thought that I am yours would be a breach of the normal course of nature." —Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength

In a thousand unseen ways we have drawn shape and strength from the land.