The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Zeno from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Categories: nature

Nature is just enough; but men and women must comprehend and accept her suggestions.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
Categories: nature

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Aristotle Parts of Animals
Categories: nature

Nature does nothing uselessly.
Aristotle Politics
Categories: nature

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E. B. White
Categories: nature

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
H. G. Wells
Categories: nature

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Categories: nature

Nature is wont to hide herself.
Heraclitus On the Universe
Categories: nature

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
Jane Austen Mansfield Park
Categories: nature

It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.
Scott Westerfeld Peeps, 2005
Categories: nature

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
Categories: nature

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.
Walt Whitman
Categories: nature

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Walt Whitman
Categories: nature

I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Charles Lindbergh Interview shortly before his death, 1974
Categories: birds nature

We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace it property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it.
Lewis Thomas The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Categories: creation nature

Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.
Izaak Walton
Categories: birds nature

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.
Joseph Addison 'The Spectator'
Categories: birds nature

When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!
William Blake
Categories: birds nature

There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
Nat Burton White Cliffs of Dover (song, 1941)
Categories: birds nature optimism

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.
Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet
Categories: nature awareness gratitude

The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.
John Muir The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
Categories: nature beauty joy happiness

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.
J. B. S. Haldane Phantoms in the Brain
Categories: awe wonder beauty nature enchantment

Beauty passes, but perfection remains with us.
Turkish proverb The Prentice-Hall Encyclopedia of World Proverbs
Categories: beauty art the arts nature

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The Book of Positive Quotations
Categories: nature beauty appreciation

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night... the breath of a buffalo in the winter time... a little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot 1821 A Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations
Categories: life beauty nature

Beauty is an end in itself, not a means to some other end.
James Ogilvy Living Without a Goal: Finding the Freedom to Live a Creative and Innovative Life by James Ogilvy
Categories: beauty art nature artists

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
Robert Lynd The Blue Lion and Other Essays
Categories: birds nature humans environmental

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

When the bold branches
Bid farewell to rainbow leaves -
Welcome wool sweaters.
B. Cybrill
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together.
For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
Edwin Teale
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as from August to November.
Rose G. Kingsley The Autumn Garden, 1905
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

A few days ago I walked along the edge of the lake and was treated to the crunch and rustle of leaves with each step I made. The acoustics of this season are different and all sounds, no matter how hushed, are as crisp as autumn air.
Eric Sloane
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.
Henry Beston Northern Farm
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
Mitchell Burgess Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992
Categories: autumn fall seasons nature

We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.
Kahlil Gibran Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations
Categories: beauty nature soul inspiration

The search for truth is in one way hard and in another way easy, for it is evident that no one can master it fully or miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur.
Aristotle The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: 14,266 Thoughts on the Business of Life
Categories: truth knowledge growth nature

By confronting us with irreducible mysteries that stretch our daily vision to include infinity, nature opens an inviting and guiding path toward a spiritual life.
Thomas Moore The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Categories: nature mystery beauty spirituality

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
Rumi The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
Categories: beauty nature actions love

The poor need not only bread. The poor also need beauty.
Monsignor Hildebrand The Vein of Gold : A Journey to Your Creative Heart
Categories: poverty need necessity beauty nature

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning. That is,... all that is beautiful and sublime and the world takes part in the beauty of what one loves, and this unexpected glimpse of happiness immediately fills the eyes with tears. This is how love of the beautiful and love give each other life.
Stendhal The Spirit of Loving
Categories: beauty art nature love happiness

One does not need to fast for days and meditate for hours at a time to experience the sense of sublime history which constantly envelops us. All one need do is notice intelligently, if even for a brief moment, a blossoming tree, a forest flooded with autumn colors, an infant smiling.
Simon Greenberg A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles
Categories: meditation prayer beauty nature contemplation

There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery...not for penetrating clear though but for the whisperings of the irrational...not for science but for wizadry disguised as science..not for rationally founded influence but for magic.
Karl Jaspers Thoughts on Leadership: A Treasury of Quotations
Categories: soul mystery sublime meditation nature art

Nobody sees a flower--really--it is so small it takes
Georgia O'Keeffe The Artist's Way
Categories: vision nature beauty discovery friendship

You agree--I'm sure you agree, that beauty is the only thing worth living for.
Agatha Christie Simple Abundance
Categories: beauty nature art appreciation music meaning life

Every true deed is a loving deed. All true deeds rise from contact with a beloved thing and flow into universe. Any true deed brings, out of lived unity, unity into the world. Unity is not a property of the world, but its task. To form unity out of the world is our never-ending work.
Martin Buber The Spirit of Loving
Categories: truth honesty love unity nature society

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: thought aging youth beauty love nature

And do not be conformed to this world, ``but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 Holy Bible
Categories: nature creation man mind thought intelligence self-awareness

There is nothing in nature as perfect or as powerful as the human nervous system--not the seamless folding of the seasons one into the other; not the rolling biogenetic mass of the oceans; not the great silent spin of the planets around the sun.
David Noonan Neuro-: Life on the frontlines of brain surgery and neurological medicine by David Noonan
Categories: nature creation man mind thought intelligence self-awareness

The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a temple of majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the paradise of God.
Thomas Traherne How to Want What You Have
Categories: world nature beauty paradise perception appreciation peace

A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.
Samuel Johnson The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: nature work opportunity envy anger evil discovery god

Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.
Samuel Johnson The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: curiosity art nature ideas discovery observation learning knowledge

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus you may feel your pulse.
Henry David Thoreau The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: morning spring nature life aging attitude age wellness

Look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Albert Einstein The Quotable Einstein
Categories: nature universe mystery creation creator god understanding learning

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
attributed Chief Seattle The Power of Myth
Categories: nature environmentalism conservation preservation natural spaces gaia

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.
King Solomon Ecclesiastes 1:7
Categories: nature cycle of life renewal growth change learning wisdom

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
King Solomon Ecclesiates 3:1, Holy Bible
Categories: nature cycle of life wisdom growth change acceptance rhythm

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Theodore Roosevelt Power Quotes
Categories: nature natural resources future environmental stewardship wilderness preservation

An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. Enchantment may be a state of rapture and ecstasy in which the soul comes to the foreground, and the literal concerns of survival and daily preoccupation at least momentarily fade into the background.
Thomas Moore The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Categories: enchantment beauty nature meditation creation soul spirituality imagination

Do not fail
To learn from
The pure voice of an
Ever-flowing mountain stream
Splashing over the rocks.
Morihei Ueshiba The Art of Peace
Categories: obstacles challenges difficulties problems growth change learning nature education

Nobody sees a flower--really--it is so small it takes time--we haven't time--and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keefe The Artist's Way
Categories: vision nature beauty discovery friendship relationships busyness time patience

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfillment that makes life purposeful and vibrant.
Thomas Moore The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Categories: nature beauty spirituality soul heart imagination value love fulfillment purpose meaning

If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can't help but learn.
Bernie Siegel, MD Handbook for the Soul
Categories: nature adversity difficulty challenges obstacles renewal change growth rebirth overcoming

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
T.S. Eliot The Book of Positive Quotations
Categories: meaning purpose joy happy happiness words courage bravery art nature spirituality character integrity honesty truth

Growth of the soul is our goal, and
Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. Handbook for the Soul
Categories: personal growth self-improvement change love nature forgiveness service volunteerism love action

Contemplate the workings of this world, listen to the words of the wise, and take all that is good as your own. With this as your base, open your own door to truth. Do not overlook the truth that is right before you. Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from the holy books and wise people. Everything--even mountains, rivers, plants, and trees--should be your teacher.
Morihei Ueshiba The Art of Peace
Categories: nature wisdom learning self-improvement growth truth wisdom

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to the stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear on cheerfully, do all bravely, awaiting occasions, worry never; in a word to, like the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.
William Ellery Channing The Book of Positive Quotations
Categories: necessities moderation authenticity character integrity work effort thought demeanor kindness honesty actions nature appreciation learning growth wisdom courage bravery stress anxiety self-improvement