When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

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

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

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

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

The effects of climate change are real and must be acted on.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

‚O sleep, O gentle sleep,‘ I thought gratefully, ‚Nature’s soft nurse!‘

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

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

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

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

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.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

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

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

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 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.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.

We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.

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

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

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.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Nature is not human hearted.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.

I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents. Primarily because of the activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center, and in international affairs, and to some degree, domestic affairs, on energy conservation, on environment, and things of that kind.

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.