"The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into."
Nature quotes
Nature
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Nature quotes (page 18 of 183)
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"The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap."
"You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things."
"Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf."
"The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature."
"Nature does nothing in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes."
"One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand-to see that heaven lies about us here in this world."
"We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves."
"How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!"
"In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth."
"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."
"Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly."
"Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them."
"The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom."
"Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer."
"It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it."
"My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing."
"Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant."
"Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth."
"Great things are done when men and mountains meet."