Nathanael Johnson Quotes

The first step is to stop thinking of nature as something far away that we must save from someone else and start seeing it all around us. The first step is to open our eyes to the existence of nature in our daily lives.

None of the ginkgo's aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It's not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal or rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take open-hearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.

The aim of the book you are holding is to persuade people (myself first and foremost) to slow down enough to see the wonders around us.

But Roosevelt was just as much a faker. He constructed his macho persona from the ground up. When he first entered public life at the age of twenty-three as a New York state assemblyman, he was a rich kid with soft hands, a squeaky voice, and clothes that were a little too fashionable for his own good. The newspapers gave him nicknames: "Jane-Dandy," "our own Oscar Wilde," and "Punkin-Lily." He went west to shake this reputation. Viewed from this angle, Roosevelt's entire life looks like one gigantic exercise in overcompensation.

To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love.

When you are able to affix yourself somehow, to bridge the abyss with a relationship with another creature of any sort, it's easier to make the case that there is some way in which the whole of creation matters, that it has, if not a purpose, at least an invigorating vitality.

If we come to love nature not only when it is rare and beautiful, but also when it is commonplace and even annoying, I believe it will heal the great wound of our species: our self-imposed isolation from the rest of life, our loneliness for nature. We might remember that we are no different from our surroundings, that the trees and birds are as much our neighbors as other humans. We might remember that before the land belonged to us, we belonged to it. We could belong again.

It's simply not possible to always see the world fresh and in full, like a child, while also making money, paying bills on time, and taking care of a family...But doing this work and occasionally acting like a two-year-old pays dividends of awe and pleasure. It doesn't take very much time to notice that you live within nature...Wonder doesn't come from outside after driving somewhere spectacular, it comes from within: It's a union of the natural world and the mind prepared to receive it.

The more closely we looked the more the world opened itself to us, as if to reward our attention.