Quotes about Nature

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.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.

My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes.

But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.

If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we'd be angels, and amgels can't love the way men and women do.

I wonder how a lioness will manage in a dovecote. Can you put away your teeth and claws?

The air was soft, as it often was in this lovely month, and Eddie inhaled its sweetness. He found himself uplifted as he worked, caught up in something outside himself and his petty wants and needs. The clouds drifted like ice in a tumbler. Through his lens the river seemed made of light, there was the shimmer, and for a moment the world seemed whole to him.