Quotes about Nature

To get to know a country, you must have direct contact with the earth. It's futile to gaze at the world through a car window.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence

The scientific theorist is not to be envied. For Nature, or more precisely experiment, is an inexorable and not very friendly judge of his work. It never says Yes to a theory. In the most favorable cases it says Maybe, and in the great majority of cases simply No. If an experiment agrees with a theory it means for the latter Maybe, and if it does not agree it means No. Probably every theory will someday experience its No - most theories, soon after conception.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks." And

Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.