Explore Quotes by Henry Beston

Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.

The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and june these elemental presences lived and had their being.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.

I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.

Wolves are not our brothers; they are not our subordinates, either. They are another nation, caught up just like us in the complex web of time and life.

To know only artificial night is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

As well expect Nature to answer your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.

If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture.

Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of man.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.

When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.

Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciless use of clothes. Though some scold today because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful.

A garden is the mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms.

If gardeners will forget a little the phrase, "watering the plants" and think of watering as a matter of "watering the earth" under the plants, keeping up its moisture content and gauging its need, the garden will get on very well.