Quotes on Nature

All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.

To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy.

Look abroad through Nature's range, Nature's mighty law is change.

I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...

It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature. But those who have a psssion for nature in the natural way, need no pictures nor gallereies. Spring is their designer, and the whole year their artist.

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

No form of nature is inferior to art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.

The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it.

Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.

My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.

Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own.

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.

The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.

I am in love with this world . . . I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.

...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

We inter-breath with the rain forests, we drink from the oceans. They are part of our own body.

The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature.