Appreciating Nature Quotes

This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing. ~ Tilda Swinton

It should be expected that we will find wonder in a vast mountain landscape, but it is a more serious challenge to find wonder in a hill. It is a great achievement to find it in a molehill. ~ Tristan Gooley

No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. ~ Charles Francis Richter

I'm quite contrary. If people agree on something, I tend to gravitate the other way by my nature. I don't like to be told what to do. I think it goes back to school. I like to do things I want to do and I really don't like doing what I don't want to do. ~ Andy Serkis

Since nature abhors a vacuum, the void must be in you. ~ Marty Rubin

When I read Katana's run in 'Birds of Prey,' I was curious about her restraint. She didn't laugh, didn't loosen up, didn't seem to have a light side. I thought, well, that demure nature is what we believe of women of Old Japan, so she seemed not like a modern Japanese but from an earlier time. ~ Ann Nocenti

Sometimes the male flowers rise to the surface when there are not yet any pistillated flowers in the vicinity. And at other times, when low water permits them easily to reach their companions, they still break their stems no less automatically and uselessly. I maintain here, once again, that the whole genius rests in the species, in life or nature, and that the individual on the whole is stupid. Only in mankind do we find true emulation of the two intelligences, an increasingly precise and active tendency toward a kind of balance that is the great secret of our future. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

What is made of water and fire
for isn't that what a man whose nature opposes his responsibilities can be said to be? Does one quench the other, or do they combine to ignite the depths of the soul? ~ Alice Hoffman

…it is no longer useful to…keep defining and elaborating our understandings of the exact nature of racism, sexism, class and sexual orientation as if they ever operated in isolation. ~ Aurora Levins Morales

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature. ~ O. Henry

[Fall, 1951]

To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor's hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances. ~ Anais Nin

Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It's fun to think that one day our great, great grandchildren may get that much closer to understanding what the hell creation is doing here in the first place, and glimpsing the underlying structure and nature of matter itself. Hopefully they won't live with the same existential horrors we all quietly face today in our own lives.

There is a kind of bravery to our condition, I reckon: brought into being without an explanation, in a potentially infinite and apparently dead universe, and expected to just get on with it as though nothing strange is going on. Well it fucking is. And it's all right to have a meltdown about the whole affair from time to time, faced with the pressures of modern existence, trying to be a good human and a good worker and a good son/daughter/parent, trying to be a good citizen, trying to be wise without condescension but uninhibited without recklessness, trying to just muddle through without making any silly decisions, trying to align with the correct political opinions, trying to stay thin, trying to be attractive, trying to be smart, trying to find the ideal partner, trying to stay financially secure, trying to just find some modest corner of meaning and belonging and sanity to go and sit in, and all the while living on the edge of dying forever.

We're all in the same strange boat, grappling with the same strange condition. But it isn't quite so scary if we all do it together. So let's do it together. ~ Exurb1a

Yet solitude need not be loneliness: it can also be the cure of loneliness. It is not a matter of "learning to live without others," but rather of learning to live with nature and others, not outshouting them with our insistent presence, but being instead ready to see and hear, in love and respect. For, in understanding as in sense perception, it is when we stop speaking that we begin to hear; when we stop staring, things emerge before our eyes; when we stop insistingon our explanations, we can begin to understand. As solitude dissolves the opacity of our collective monad and the dusk lights up the moral sense of life, humans can begin to see. ~ Erazim V. Kohák

I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me. ~ Neal Stephenson

The essences of the Gods never came into existence (for that which always is never comes into existence; and that exists for ever which possesses primary force and by nature suffers nothing): neither do they consist of bodies; for even in bodies the powers are incorporeal. Neither are they contained by space; for that is a property of bodies. Neither are they separate from the first cause nor from one another, just as thoughts are not separate from mind nor acts of knowledge from the soul. ~ Sallust

I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,
each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The nature of living and loving is the act of reciprocity. As women, we are told that to be the guest is to receive. We are told that to be the host is to give. But what if it is the reverse? What if it is the guest who gives to the host and it is the host who receives from the guest each time she sets her table to welcome and feed those she loves? To be the guest and the host simultaneously is to imagine a mutual exchange of gifts predicated on respect and joy. If we could adopt this truth, perhaps we as women would be less likely to become martyrs. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The attainment of knowledge is the high and exclusive attribute of man, among the numberless myriads of animated beings, inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. On him alone is bestowed, by the bounty of the Creator of the universe, the power and the capacity of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge is the attribute of his nature which at once enables him to improve his condition upon earth, and to prepare him for the enjoyment of a happier existence hereafter. ~ John Quincy Adams

You're never lost. You always know exactly where you are. You're right here. It's just that sometimes you've misplaced your destination.
Brian W. Porter 2005
Have you ever wondered how the computer you're using got to the store? How about your medicines, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the furniture, the plants in the garden center? Do they have a railroad right there? Does merchandise magically appear? Only if you grow your own food, make your own clothes, make your own tools, cut your own wood, and make your own furniture, can you get away from trucking. Everything you see, even the nature outside in some places, has been on at least one truck. ~ Brian W. Porter

Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ah, the young! Always so convinced their problems are unique in nature and unique to themselves. ~ Den Patrick

I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory. ~ Sanober Khan

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I drank from the crisp mountain stream, tasting filtered sky with a mossy undertone. I've never understood how being loved fully could change your entire perspective of the world. I only ever understood the wistfulness of it, and the longing and the frothy, violent bits. The mixed up, rained on parts. The escaped bits that smudge and bleed through. Slowly, I am coming to terms with how vulnerable I am to you, flat on my back like a submissive wolf pup. Daisy petals line your eyelashes, juice of a nectarine flavors your tongue. The side of your mouth twitches, hazy dreamscapes overtaking your mind while we bathe in the glorious autumn devastation. ~ Taylor Rhodes

In our personal spaces, where there are no eyes to guide our better nature caressing our intentions, we sometimes gnaw in the agonizing realization that, although we charitably took on the rough task with smiling faces, our condescension has produced our worst nightmare. For a new work has triggered our insecure buttons, birthing the fear that the author may flow past our selfish desires, and find their way into the ocean of our faith, leaving us alone and desperate. And so we must, with the extremest prejudice, bomb their potential future by damming all of our congratulations. Rendering Goodreads a stale pond of green algae and used condoms. But do we not know that this same pond we all must drink from? Instead of filing another dead weight upon our self-deprecation, we should condescend to our own little devils, transforming them into loving companions with our guidance, so they may sprout wings in our charity, by praising this new work loudly to all of our friends and acquaintances. Instead of a dam, we can fashion a fountain of ascension, whose poetic mead, we may all get drunk on. Then, one day, those that we have assisted, we may one day find them returning us the favor by building us a fountain. That's my opinion on the subject anyway. This has been an exercise in poetic articulation. Signing off. ~ Sun Moon

The direction of research . . .should be:
- toward non-violence rather than violence,
- towards a harmonious cooperation with nature rather than with warfare against nature;
- towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than [our often] noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions. ~ E.F. Schumacher

It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don't mean gaining "self-knowledge" or understanding one's "true nature" but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology. ~ Chang-rae Lee

As a Korean War Veteran, I know too well the troubling nature of war. This is why I will always support a diplomatic answer before military intervention. ~ Charles B. Rangel

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. ~ Steven Weinberg

But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange. ~ Samuel Pepys

Society, like nature, is one body, really. ~ Susan Griffin

One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever-and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage. ~ Edward Abbey

Just as a son, to be a son of man, must be of the same nature and spirit of his father; so with the sons of God, and so it will be with all who are born of the spirit of God. ~ Elias Hicks

Not much more than a broke disgrace who's hooked on tonics, so excuse him if his poker face has puke on it. ~ Hannibal Lecture

You will begin to see desire's impermanent nature, and you will also realize that you do not have to act on every thought or desire. You will learn that you can choose from the many possibilities of how to respond to desire when it arises, and you can discover a new kind of freedom, where you do not have to follow your desires, but can choose to behave in new ways in response to your desires. ~ Jack Kornfield

She was coming to look on men and women as fellow survivors; well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or just put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of a deeper assertion to life.
Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. That risk had come up before. ~ Shirley Hazzard

For all the hard times and tough challenges I faced during different periods of my life, I think I was lucky or blessed or both. When things looked bleak, a good guide would appear to set me straight. Someone once asked me about the villains who got in my way, the bad guys who wanted to trip me up or take me out. I don't remember any. Maybe it's my nature to remember the good and forget the bad, or maybe it's my destiny to lock onto the righteous for help. ~ B.B. King

Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes I would hold it in for days so that I could have a really big one and also because it felt good in itself. When I really did have to shit, so much that I could barely stand upright but had to bend forward, I had such a fantastic feeling in my body if I didn't let nature take its course, if I squeezed the muscles in my butt together as hard as I could and, as it were, forced the shit back to where it came from. But this was a dangerous game, because if you did it too many times the turd ultimately grew so big it was impossible to shit it out. Oh Christ, how it hurt when such an enormous turd had to come out! It was truly unbearable, I was convulsed with pain, it was as if my body were exploding with pain, AAAAAAGGGHHH!! I screamed, OOOOOHHH, and then, just as it was at its very worst, suddenly it was out.
Oh, how good that was! ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I think we should love life, nature, other people, more than ourselves. ~ Marty Rubin

Dawn and sunset are the times when Nature herself is unstable and in flux. The nocturnal world and the daytime world are meeting, and for a brief time coexisting. It's not a neat hard cut, but a blurred, irregular dissolve. These moments are the seams in existence through which we can get a glimpse of the deeper, fundamentally random, chance workings of a system in which we are only a small, insignificant player. ~ Bill Viola

I'm gonna live forever, or die trying. ~ Joseph Heller