What are your favorite nature-themed quotes?
One I recently found and really love is this;
”Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” - Lao Tzu
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”I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.” ― Bjork
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, In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks." - John Muir
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I think this one is fairly pertinent:
" People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by the singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place." - Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
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I don’t have one in particular but this one from Louis Agassiz captures the mindset I’ve adopted during the pandemic:
“I spent the summer traveling; I got halfway across my back yard.”
Also:
“To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” – Aldo Leopold.
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Thoreau wrote “I have great faith in a seed.” 
In context:
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
It is a quote that comes to my mind sometimes, especially when I see how nature (a small plant, a small animal, etc.) makes its way even in inhospitable places or deteriorated by human action.
Reference:
Thoreau, H. D. & Dean, Bradley P. (ed.). Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and other Late Natural History Writings. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993.
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stay together
learn the flowers
go light
Gary Snyder, For the Children, in Turtle Island, 1974.
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Welcome to the Forum! Always lots to do here.
“There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.””
The Creator Has an Inordinate Fondness for Beetles – Quote Investigator
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“Replay the tape [of evolution] a million times…and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.” Stephen Jay Gould on the role of contingency in evolution.
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‘You’re sure it isn’t venomous?’
- multiple Darwin award winners
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I love this. After a year of lockdown here in South Africa I think I am also just halfway across my front yard.
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From my late mom:
I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There, a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself. I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
H. D. Thoreau.
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“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
― John Muir
and
“When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.”
― John Muir
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I love all these, especially the one about only getting halfway across your yard!
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“When the last tree has been cut, the last river poisoned and the last fish been caught, only then we realise that we cannot eat money”.
This is the only nature quote coming to my mind right now. I’ve heard it a lot but not sure about the source. I think it’s a native American one.
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Not direct quotes of strictly nature, but I apply them as such:
“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
― E.B. White
“It isn’t much good having anything exciting, if you can’t share it with somebody.”
—Winnie the Pooh
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Love that you took them from books!
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Edwin Way Teale’s Grassroot Jungles changed one word: he said his front yard.
Mine is from Rachel Carson:
"Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” – from Silent Spring
And another of hers:
“Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is – whether its victim is human or animal – we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”
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For a bear of very little brain, Winnie the Pooh was very wise!
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