It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

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.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‚them‘ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‚us.‘

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

To be treated well in places where you don’t expect to be treated well, to find things in common with people you thought previously you had very, very little in common with, that can’t be a bad thing.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is far deeper than that – it is spiritual transaction with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

Sometimes I think my husband is so amazing that I don’t know why he’s with me. I don’t know whether I’m good enough. But if I make him happy, then I’m everything I want to be.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.

The faster you go, the shorter you are.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

Intimates are predestined.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

For greed all nature is too little.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

You can stroke people with words.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.