Let religion be to us the wonder and lure
of that which is only partly known and understood:
An eye that glories in nature's majesty and beauty,
and a heart that rejoices in deeds of kindness and of courage.

- Vincent B. Silliman

Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point.

- Harold B. Melchart

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito. [Spirituality for the Skeptic]

- Robert C. Solomon

Keep close to Nature's heart. Break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

- John Muir

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

- Walt Whitman

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

- Christopher Lasch

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them.

- Marcus Aurelius

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

- Thomas Moore

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

- Thor Heyerdahl

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

- Henry David Thoreau

Nature abhors a vacuum.

- Baruch Spinoza

It is in the Earth's green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;

- Rabindranath Tagore

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

- D. H. Lawrence



Whatever is natural admits of variety.

- Madame de Stael



We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

- Rachel Carson



Nature creates ability; luck provides it with opportunity.

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld



Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

- May Sarton



Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

- George Washington Carver



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.

- John Muir



Nature, to be controlled, must be obeyed.

- Francis Bacon



The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 20 or 30 farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings.

- Richard Dawkins



Watching birds has become part of my daily meditation affirming my connection to the earth body.

- Carol P. Christ



The Hopi Indians of Arizona believe that our daily rituals and prayers literally keep this world spinning on its axis. For me, feeding the seagulls is one of those everyday prayers.

- Brenda Peterson



My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God's lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.

- Henry David Thoreau



Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.

- Anne Wilson Schaef



The world is always in movement.

- V. S. Naipaul



We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

- Francis Bacon



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

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti



The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. [Uncle Vanya, 1897]

- Anton Chekhov



Creation is all things and us. It is us in relationship with all things. All things, the ones we see and the ones we do not; the whirling galaxies and the wild suns, the black holes and the microorganisms, the trees and the stars, the fish and the whales - the molten lava and the towering snow-capped mountains, the children we give birth to and their children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.

- Matthew Fox



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

- Blaise Pascal



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

- Blaise Pascal



If people think that nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

- Kurt Vonnegut



In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

- Aristotle



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



Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

- Buckminster Fuller



To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

- James Russell Lowell