Nature Quotes

"Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own."

- Charles Dickens

"Wilderness is not a luxury but necessity of the human spirit."

- Edward Abbey

"Come forth into the light things, let nature be your teacher."

- William Wordsworth

"The Earth has music for those who listen."

- William Shakespeare

"The desert wears… a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent, it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act, it seems to be waiting — but waiting for what?"

- Edward Abbey

"The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask."

- Nancy Newhall

"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by the singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place."

- Barbara Kingsolver

"To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."

- Aldo Leopold

"stay together learn the flowers go light"

- Gary Snyder

"There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”"

- J.B.S. Haldane

"Replay the tape [of evolution] a million times…and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again."

- Stephen Jay Gould

"When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world."

- John Muir

"Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art."

- Louisa May Alcott

"With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day."

- Elizabeth Gaskell

"Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing."

- Doris Lessing

"There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic."

- J.L. Carr

"A faint blush below the horizon, as the first kiss from the Sun wakes the Earth from its slumber."

- Meeta Ahluwalia

"If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans... When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man."

- Wilfrid Noyce

"Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery."

- John Ruskin

"Nature provides exceptions to every rule."

- Margaret Fuller

"Green Puerto Rico, talkative and wild! That you seem to think as if you were human; You talk as if you were the expression of the landscape, Of the moods of the rolling hills and of the plains."

- José Antonio Dávila

"If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in Water."

- Loren Eiseley

"Wildness is the preservation of the World."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."

- Carl Sagan

"The miracle of nature is right there in front of you."

- David Attenborough

"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."

- John Muir

"When you go out there (into the wilderness), you don’t get away from it all, you get back to it all. You come home to what’s important. You come home to yourself."

- Peter Dombrovskis

"Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?"

- Walt Disney

"It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living."

- David Attenborough

"We can never have enough of Nature."

- Henry David Thoreau