Quotes about Nature

Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the East, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist.

I woke up from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where, because I couldn't see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive on.

Sometimes I'd yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel - What is the meaning of the void? The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.

Maybe that's a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated, said Japhy. A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles. (The Dharma Bums, Chap. 8)

The whole purpose of mountain-climbing to me isn't just to show off you can get to the top, it's getting out to this wild country.

This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy

As I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and I knelt on the trail and said Thank you, shack. The I added Blah with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would know what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world

Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon,' wrote Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, 'then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls

Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summer night. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same.

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

They that are of the flesh cannot do the works of the Spirit, neither can they that are spiritual do the works of the flesh, even as faith cannot do the works of unbelief, nor unbelief the works of faith.