Anne Frank:

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell:

Nature is just enough; but men and women must comprehend and accept her suggestions.

Anton Chekhov:

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. [Uncle Vanya, 1897]

Blaise Pascal:

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Blaise Pascal:

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Buckminster Fuller:

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Claude Monet:

The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.

Emily Dickinson:

My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word—
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply—
My constant—reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy.

Emily Dickinson:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Emily Dickinson:

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to min,
His furniture is love.

Ernest Becker:

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

Francis Bacon:

We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

Galileo:

The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

George Santayana:

... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Helen Keller:

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Henry David Thoreau:

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

Henry David Thoreau:

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Henry David Thoreau:

I was determined to know beans. Walden

Henry David Thoreau:

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

James Russell Lowell:

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

John Burroughs:

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

John Muir:

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you...
while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

John Muir:

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.

John Steinbeck:

There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.

Joseph Wood Krutch:

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

Kenneth Patton:

The day I see a leaf is a marvel of a day.

Kurt Vonnegut:

If people think that nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

Linda Hogan:

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.

Luther Burbank:

A flower is an educated weed.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

Murray Gell-Mann:

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

On every stem, on every leaf ... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.

Pearl S. Buck:

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

Pearl S. Buck:

I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

Rabindranath Tagore:

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rachel Carson:

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Rachel Carson:

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carson:

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.

Rachel Carson:

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Toni Morrison:

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Walt Whitman:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Wendell Berry:

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

William Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
An eternity in an hour.

William Wordsworth:

Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.

This entry continued ...

Zeno:

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.