Nature Quotes - Page 20

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.

Dance,' they told me, and I stood still,
and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

'Pray,' they said, and I laughed,
covering myself in the earth's brightnesses,
and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,
and prayed like an orphan.

The resurrection of the morning.
The mystery of the night.
The hummingbird's wings.
The excitement of thunder.
The rainbow in the waterfall.
Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields.

I have always loved the many moods of the sky at Rocky Flats. Turquoise and teal in summer, fiery red at sunset, iron gray when snow is on the way. The land rolls in waves of tall prairie grass bowed to the wind, or sprawling mantles of white frosted with a thin sheath of ice in winter.

When nature suffers because it is destroyed by human activities, the notion of beauty is really losing its meaning, because nothing is more aesthetic than the natural beauty.

The birds looked upon me as nothing but a man, quite a trifling creature without wings - and they would have nothing to do with me. Were it not so I would build a small cabin for myself among their crowd of nests and pass my days counting the sea waves.

Some prefer the wildness. Some the calm. There's enough of both in the world for everyone to have their choice. And enough time for any to change their mind.

True joy of nature is when every drop of water shines like a pearl.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.

She was beautiful in a way that only wild things can be beautiful.

Nature, you always think she won’t get any better, but she proves you wrong, again and again. She will prove you wrong until you take your leave, and then she will continue to work her charms on the humans who follow.

Beauty is a primeval phenomenon. It never makes an appearance itself, but is a visible reflection in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind. It is as various as nature herself.

We are touched by magic wands. For just a fraction of our day life is perfect, and we are absolutely happy and in harmony with the earth. The feeling passes much too quickly. But the memory – and the anticipation of other miracles – sustains us in the battle indefinitely.

I found lines that mirrored an ache and longing I had so often felt when the beauty around my woods cathedral was too intense, when the need to grasp and keep loveliness left me with a sense of desolate frustration.

It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.

I believe in Christ like I believe in the sun - not because I can see it, but by it I can see everything else.

Of course I am thinking the Lord was once young and will never in fact be old.
And who else could this be, who goes off down the green path,
Carrying his sandals, and singing?