Nature

• "In the landscape of spring, there is neither better nor worse. The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short." --Zen saying

• "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." --Navajo Proverb

• "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." --Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)

• "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit."
  • Translation: You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC)

• "We cannot command nature except by obeying her." –-Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• "Nature is infallible and is the voice of God, with this difference, that the language of the Holy Scripture can and should be interpreted in many ways (otherwise it would say many things contrary to the evidence of the senses), but the language of Nature is always the same, without metaphor, without allegory, without hyperbole, without doubtful, obscure, mysterious meanings. Nature speaks clearly to him who knows how to understand her, and has no need of interpretation." [original Italian or French] –-Antonio Vallisnieri (1661-1730), letter to Louis Bourguet, 30.8.1721

• "Look abroad through Nature's range,

Nature's mighty law is change." –-Robert Burns (1759-1796), Let not woman e'er complain, 1794

• "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself." –-William Blake (1757-1827)

• "Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown." –-Humphry Davy (1778-1829), 30.11.1825

• "Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep." –-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." –-John Muir (1838-1914)

• "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." –-John Muir (1838-1914)

• "Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral." –-John Burroughs (1837-1921)

• "Nature answers only when she is questioned." --Jacob Henle (1809-1885)

• Calvin: "That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let's go watch TV." –-Bill Watterson, Something under the bed is drooling, 1988

• "I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature -– a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation." ~Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Prologue (In: Bully for Brontosaurus), 1991

• "The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves)." –-Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Prologue (In: Bully for Brontosaurus), 1991

• "Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?" –-Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Tires to sandals (In: Eight little piggies), 1993

• "The moment one give close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." --Henry Miller

• "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things." ~Mary Oliver