"And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."~William Shakespeare~

"The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong."~Sam Walter Foss~

"A rhododendron bud lavender-tipped.  Soon a glory of blooms to clash with the cardinals and gladden the hummingbirds!"~Dave Beard~

"My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - will it return to my body when they scatter?"~Kotomichi~

"The tulip and the butterfly
Appear in gayer coats than I:
Let me be dressed fine as I will,
Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still."~Isaac Watts~

"Human nature is just about the only nature some people experience."~Abigail Charleson~

"Nature is my medicine."~Sara Moss-Wolfe~

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."~Rachel Carson~

"Fire is the best of servants; but what a master!"~Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Book II, chapter 9~

"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature."~Abraham Cowley~

"How many stanzas in the springtime breeze?
How plenty the raindrops? As He doth please.
There is no meter and there is no rhyme,
Yet God's poems always read in perfect time."~Astrid Alauda, "Poems on Nature"~

"You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River?  Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them."~Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978~

"Climb up on some hill at sunrise.  Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you'll find it there."~Robb Sagendorph~

"What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet."
~Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid~

"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe." ~John Berger, The Sense of Sight, 1980~

"Happiness flutters in the air whilst we rest among the breaths of nature."~Kelly Scheaffer~

"All I want is to stand in a field
and to smell green,
to taste air,
to feel the earth want me,
Without all this concrete
hating me."~Phillip Pulfrey, from Love, Abstraction and other Speculations,~

"Nature is man's teacher.  She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence."~Alfred Billings Street~

"There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon."~Alice Meynell~

"Watching clouds roll by
on a sunny day
Who needs church?
Nature is divine."~Carrie Latet~

"With innovation and technology, seems we have forgotten to cherish the true beauty the world has to offer."~A.C. Van Cherub~

"Nature holds all the answers - go outside and ask some questions - open your heart and listen to the response!"~Amethyst Wyldfyre,~

"Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower."~Alan C. Kay~

"Let us permit nature to have her way.  She understands her business better than we do."~Michel de Montaigne~

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."~Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991~

"Nature will not be admired by proxy."~Winston Churchill~

"I am not a lover of lawns.  Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn."~W.H. Hudson, The Book of a Naturalist, 1919~

"I'll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time."~Emily Dickinson~

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."~John Burroughs~

"A setting sun still whispers a promise for tomorrow."~Jeb Dickerson~

"Any man that walks the mead
In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find
A meaning suited to his mind."~Alfred Tennyson~

"What a type of happy family is the family of the sun! with what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent's in at once upon him and on one another!"~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827~

"Nature will bear the closest inspection.  She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."~Henry David Thoreau~

"Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise."~George Washington Carver~

"Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books."~John Lubbock~

"There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks.  Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough to pay attention to the story."~Linda Hogan~

"Nature rejuvenates so quickly, so completely.  Though we often view ourselves otherwise, we are nature."~Jeb Dickerson~

"Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass."~Rupert Brooke~

"How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!"~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."~e.e. cummings~

"I walked barefoot - the only way to walk on a muddy road."  ~Laurie Gough, "Light on a Moonless Night"~

"A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with resignation, at the unconquerable unimplicated sun."~Llewelyn Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy~

"If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive."~Eleonora Duse~

"Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries."~John Muir~

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."~Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620~

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

"In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things.  In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me."~John Fowles~

"I've made an odd discovery.  Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility.  Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."~Bertrand Russell~

"Truly it may be said that the outside of a mountain is good for the inside of a man."~George Wherry, Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot, 1896~

"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."~Henry David Thoreau, journal, 5 January 1856~

"The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven."~William Channing~

"Drinking nature is an unquenchable thirst."~Berri Clove~

"Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back."~Gwyn Thomas~

"If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature's way."~Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics~

"A wee child toddling in a wonder world.... I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers.  If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan."~Zitkala-Sa~

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."~William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned," 1798~

"You will find something more in woods than in books.  Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters."~St. Bernard~

"Nature teaches more than she preaches.  There are no sermons in stones.  It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral."  ~John Burroughs~

"Nature is the art of God."~Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635~

"The color of the mountains is Buddha's body; the sound of running water is his great speech."~Dogen~

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God."~Elizabeth Barrett Browning~

"Nature never goes out of style."

"Nature is a writer's best friend."~Agavé Powers~

"There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me."~Thomas Jefferson~

"Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated.  But if it's like that, then I want out."~Steven Weinberg~

"To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life."~John Burroughs~