Top 100 Nature Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best nature quotes ever written, picked out of the full nature archive on QuoteForever. You will find Charles Dickens, Edward Abbey, Albert Einstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

2

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

3

In the woods we return to reason and faith.

4

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

5

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

6

All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words.

7

Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.

8

In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

9

God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, - which correspond to the physical element in us, - do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond.

10

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

11

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.

12

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

13

For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

14

Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.

15

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

16

...but when The Spirit speaks,—or beauty from the sky Descends into my being,—when I hear The storm-hymns of the mighty ocean roll, Or thunder sound,—the champion of the storm!— Then I feel envy for immortal words, The rush of living thought; oh! then I long To dash my feelings into deathless verse, That may administer to unborn time, And tell some lofty soul how I have lived A worshipper of Nature and of Thee!

17

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

18

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

19

Nature is a book of many pages and each page tells a fascinating story to him who learns her language. Our fertile valleys and craggy mountains recite an epic poem of geologic conflicts. The starry sky reveal gigantic suns and space and time without end.

20

Coy Nature, (which remain'd, though aged grown, A beauteous virgin still, enjoy'd by none, Nor seen unveil'd by anyone), When Harvey's violent passion she did see, Began to tremble and to flee; Took sanctuary, like Daphne, in a tree: There Daphne's Lover stopped, and thought it much The very leaves of her to touch: But Harvey, our Apollo, stopp'd not so; Into the Bark and Root he after her did go!

21

There is not in nature, a thing that makes man so deformed, so beastly, as doth intemperate anger.

22

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

23

Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.

24

To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

25

Man has become a superman ... because he not only disposes oinnate, physical forces, but because he is in command ... olatent forces in nature and because he can put them to his service.... But the essential fact we must surely all feel in our hearts ... is that we are becoming inhuman in proportion as we become supermen.

26

If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.

27

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

28

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

29

There is no nature at an instant.

30

How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.

31

We listen too much to the telephone and too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing.

32

Nothing is given to man on earth - struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible - the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.

33

The point to be grasped from the saintly tradition is that to love animals is not sentimentality (as we know it) but true spirituality. Of course there can be vain, self-seeking loving, but to go (sometimes literally) out of our way to help animals, to expend effort to secure their protection and to feel with them their suffering and to be moved by it-these are surely signs of spiritual greatness.

34

There are few pleasures like really burrowing one's nose into sweet peas.

35

Nature is so powerful, so strong. It takes you to a place within yourself.

36

We must not feel a childish disgust at the investigations of the meaner animals. For there is something marvelous in all natural things.

37

For nature by the same cause, provided it remain in the same condition, always produces the same effect, so that either coming-to-be or passing-away will always result.

38

Flowers are words which even a baby can understand.

39

Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.

40

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

41

If people were superior to animals, they'd take good care of them," said Pooh.

42

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

43

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

44

Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us.

45

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

46

Relying on another is an expression of attachment, not love, a manifestation of insecurity and suffering, not understanding the true nature of our lives.

47

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

48

To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.

49

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

50

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

51

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

52

Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.

53

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

54

Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;.

55

I can see others in the sunlight; I can see our boats' crews and our athletic young men on the glistening water, or speckled with the moving lights of sunlit leaves; but I myself am always in the shadow looking on. Not unsympathetically, - God forbid! - but looking on alone, much as I looked at Sylvia from the shadows of the ruined house, or looked at the red gleam shining through the farmer's windows, and listened to the fall of dancing feet, when all the ruin was dark that night in the quadrangle.

56

It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.

57

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

58

It was a murky confusion — here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel — of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.

59

It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.

60

Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.

61

Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue.

62

Nature is, in fact, a suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven.

63

There is something marvelously soft in the study of nature which attaches a name to every being, a thought to every name, affection and memories to every thought.

64

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

65

All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.

66

One day in the country Is worth a month in town

67

Where innocent bright-eyes daisies are With blades of grass between, Each daisy stands up like a star Out of a sky of green.

68

My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.

69

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

70

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature, we have the pedant.

71

It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.

72

Only when we connect to nature, engaged with nature, are we truly alive and vigorous. To really be alive, one must be under the sun, the moon, the shining stars and surrounded by the beautiful greenery and pure waters of the natural world.

73

A woodpecker's drilling Echoes To the mountain clouds.

74

We share the earth not only with our fellow human beings, but with all the other creatures.

75

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

76

The planet does nothing but support us, and we are constantly committing crimes against nature

77

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

78

True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.

79

If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, let us allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it.

80

The heart of childhood, from seven to eleven, is the critical period for bonding with the earth.

81

"Our experience of the world is being impoverished to the extent that it is being rendered artificial and prepackaged."

82

In your standard-issue family, of which few remain, but on which our expectations are still based, there are parents and there are children. The way you know which are which, aside from certain size and age differences and despite any behavior similarities, is that the parents are the bossy ones.

83

The world's forests are a shared stolen treasure that we must put back for our children's future

84

I like to sit in my backyard. I go out on the hammock and sit in silence and kind of meditate. Nature is calming, and it's nice to go out there and clear my head.

85

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

86

We're the only creature God ever created that doesn't want to adapt. We want to make it stand still. And one thing that's constant is nature is constantly changing.

87

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, Of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror - the wide brown land for me!

88

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.

89

You have to believe in happiness, or happiness never comes Ah, that's the reason a bird can sing - On his darkest day he believes in spring.

90

We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature.

91

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.

92

Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.

93

Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

94

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

95

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

96

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.

97

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

98

Amiable weaknesses of human nature.

99

Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.

100

That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space, time point.

More Nature quotes

This is the short list. The full nature quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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