Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. . .

Henry David Thoreau

The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.

Henry David Thoreau

The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

Henry David Thoreau

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.

Henry David Thoreau

I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.

Henry David Thoreau

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

Henry David Thoreau

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Henry David Thoreau

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Henry David Thoreau

The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.

Henry David Thoreau

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nature wants children to be children before men... Childhood has its own seeing, thinking and feeling.

Jeremy Clarkson

Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant's foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet's ability to self-heal.

Jerome K. Jerome

Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in creating the impossible.

James Cagney

Outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

Through the window of my mask I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac flecks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar transparent blue of the sea.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

We must go and see for ourselves.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

Gary Snyder

After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board

Gary Snyder

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Gary Snyder

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gaston Bachelard

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

Franz Grillparzer

When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.

Jeanette Winterson

Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.

Jewel

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

Jerzy Kosinski

Going around under an umbrella interferes with one's looking up at the sky.

Jim Fowler

The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.