Nature Quotes - Page 135

As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiencesof the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside of time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man.

The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane. . . .

The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.

We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.

We need the tonic of wildness.

In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God; though, referred to herself, she is genius; and there is a similarity between her operations and man's art even in the details and trifles. When the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe. Man's art has wisely imitated those forms into which all matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit.

Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prarie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe and America are not so interesting to the student of nature as the more fertile law itselffrom which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or lesser numbers.

Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.

What does one plant who plants a tree? One plants the friend of sun and sky; One plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty towering high.

Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.

The great pulsation of nature beats too in my breast, and when I carol aloud, I am answered by a thousand-fold echo. I hear a thousand nightingales. Spring hath sent them to awaken Earth from her morning slumber, and Earth trembles with ecstasy, her flowers are hymns, which she sings in inspiration to the sun.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

... the space left to freedom is very small.ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.

There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.

It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.

One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.

Quiet is the element of discerning what is essential.

Anger is the quintessential individual-signature emotion: I am what makes me mad.

Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a clitoris that it is assumed she is a boy. Likewise, many male children may be underdeveloped, or their genitals deformed or hidden and it is assumed that they are girls.

The spirit of a country, if it is to be true to itself, needs continually to draw great breaths of inspiration from the simple realities of the country; from the smell of its soil, the pattern of its fields, the beauty of its scenery and from the men and women who dwell and toil in the rural areas