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.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

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

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

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

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

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.

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.

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

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

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

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

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

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

The earth laughs in flowers.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Man is by nature a political animal.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.