Nature quotes
3.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside nature — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed."
"I know no study that will take you nearer the way to happiness than the study of nature - and I include in the study of nature not only things and their forces, but also mankind and their ways, and the moulding of the affections and the will into an earnest desire not only to be happy, but to create happiness."
"The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions."
"nature has not changed. The night is still unsullied, the stars still twinkle, and the wild thyme smells as sweetly now as it did then ... We may be afflicted and unhappy, but no one can take from us the sweet delight which is nature's gift to those who love her and her poetry."
"Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession."
"If you throw a stone in a pond... the waves which strike against the shores are thrown back towards the spot where the stone struck; and on meeting other waves they never intercept each other's course... In a small pond one and the same stroke gives birth to many motions of advance and recoil."
"Very great charm of shadow and light is to be found in the faces of those who sit in the doors of dark houses. The eye of the spectator sees that part of the face which is in shadow lost in the darkness of the house, and that part of the face which is lit draws its brilliancy from the splendour of the sky. From this intensification of light and shade the face gains greatly in relief and beauty by showing the subtlest shadows in the light part and the subtlest lights in the dark part."
"If you are on the side whence the wind is blowing you will see the trees looking much lighter than you would see them on the other sides; and this is due to the fact that the wind turns up the reverse side of the leaves which in all trees is much whiter than the upper side."
"What a glorious title, Nature, a veritable stroke of genius to have hit upon. It is more than a cosmos, more than a universe. It includes the seen as well as the unseen, the possible as well as the actual, Nature and Nature's God, mind and matter. I am lost in admiration of the effulgent blaze of ideas it calls forth."
"Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds."
"There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance."
"We can never have enough of Nature."
"The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve."
"Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?"
"What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?"
"Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her."
"When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?"
"If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful."
"Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home."
"Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery."
