top of page
Nature Quotes


"Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree."


"Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes."


"It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs."


"You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.'That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky."


"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication."


"God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?"



"What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination."


"Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them—it is a fact commonly known in the trade."


"Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then."


"The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time."


"What branch does not have its leaves and which twig will not have its flowers?"


"We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours."


"Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?"


"That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered."


"In summer, a soothing warm breeze on a beach is the most soothing music for the soul."


"I went home and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I stared up at the moon, watching how it's trailing edge faded into darkness, so close to being full, but not quite there. A pregnant moon, Grandma called it. Full almost to bursting, and ready to give birth to something unthinkable."


"There's never an end for the sea."


"When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene."


"Flowers that are offered for the dead, do not know the difference of where their beauty will be placed, they do not say, "This is not a palace" or "This is not a garden"; they just are. They are just beautiful, without giving regards to whether they are placed on a grave or in a castle. Flowers are just beautiful, whether they grow by the wayside or in a manicured garden. If we were all like flowers, then we would all be beautiful, with no regards to why or how. We just are. We are just beautiful."


"Accuse not Nature she hath done her part Do thou but thine!"


"Drink in the moon as though you might die of thirst."


"The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary."


"Winter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome -- black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."


"He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within."


"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain-storms and did my duty faithfully."


"SpringThe season between winter and summer, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe months March, April and May.The ability of something to return to its original shape when it is pressed down, stretched or twisted."


"A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England."


"There wouldn't be life without colour."


"A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting."


"If I can't sing, then let me listen to the songs of the wilderness and let me watch the dance of a lonely leaf."


"The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin."



"The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain."


"The thorns thinned out and the trees grew taller and straighter, their branches not beginning until a few feet over our heads. The white, peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold."
bottom of page
