One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future.

Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon.

Well, on some level, it’s similar to the psychological phenomenon of helplessness, where the will to try is lost. You get to the point where you just assume that your spontaneous call to a friend will go to voicemail or an assistant, and you decide not to bother.

During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak...

To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-NoCome play with me;Why should you runThrough the shaking treeAs though I’d a gunTo strike you dead?When all I would doIs to scratch your headAnd let you go.

The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery.

Lightning strikes the earth and thunder heralds the doom but the earth bears it all in silence, teaching us that life may be harsh to us but we shouldn’t be so to life.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;Our meddling intellectMis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—We murder to dissect.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Books! tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There’s more of wisdom in it.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Man is the interpreter of nature, science the right interpretation.

Sophia and Grandmother sat down by the shore to discuss the matter further. It was a pretty day, and the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this–dog days–that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from sea, certain things sank and...

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be...

We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy … It’s only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight...

Why I Am HappyNow has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent spin....

Feeling at home anywhere on earth, and a foreigner even in the country where I was born, I consider myself an earthling, a citizen of the world.I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind...

Men argue. Nature acts.

Dance,’ they told me, and I stood still,and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.’Pray,’ they said, and I laughed,covering myself in the earth’s brightnesses,and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,and prayed like an orphan.

Da una parte il cielo era tutto schiarito, e vi brillavano certe stellucce umide, sperdute nella sua grandezza, come in una sconfinata parete di metallo, da dove, sulla terra, venisse a cadere qualche misero soffio di vento.

Era come una mano di colore data sul venticello, sui muri gialletti della borgata, sui prati, sui carretti, sugli autobus coi grappoli agli sportelli. Una mano di colore ch’era tutta l’allegria e la miseria delle notti dell’estate del presente e del passato.

Pel motiu que a Tità res no presentava una finalitat (en cap moment i per a ningú), i pel motiu que no actuava cap guillotina de l’evolució, amputant de cada genotip el que no contribuïa a la supervivència, la natura, que no estava frenada ni per la vida que creés ni per la mort que...

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God’s dust and God’s breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of...

I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a “hypaethral book,” such as Thoreau talked about – a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that...

If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even...

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This...

…and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though...

I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fins and fronds, tentacles and wings, colourful and transparent, tiny...

I am part of the rain forest protecting myself.

Or I would be the rain itself, wreathing over the island, mingling in the quiet of moist places, filling its pores with its saturated breaths. And I would be the wind, whispering through the tangled woods, running airy fingers over the island’s face, tingling in the chill of concealed places, sighing secrets in the dawn....

live like a king

They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the moskovett, that bitter blast, that colossus of cold air that blows on...

To maintain our own economy,we are disturbing the nature’s economy

Could I but acquaint the world with Robert G. Ingersoll’s humanity, with his ideas and his sentiments of love, patience and understanding, a renascence would automatically take place that would give life and living on this little earth of ours some semblance of what we call paradise.And this great and wonderful man had to die!I...

Nature’s heart beats strong amid the hills.

The NetI made you many and many a song, Yet never one told all you are–It was as though a net of words Were flung to catch a star;It was as though I curved my hand And dipped sea-water eagerly,Only to find it lost the blue Dark splendor of the sea.

In The WoodI heard the water-fall rejoiceSinging like a choir,I saw the sun flash out of itAzure and amber fire. The earth was like an open flowerEnamelled and arrayed, The path I took to find its heartFluttered with sun and shade.And while earth lured me, gently, gently,Happy and all alone,Suddenly a heavy snakeReared black upon...

Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If...

No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa &...

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

RELUCTANCEOut through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended;I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended;I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended.The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keepingTo ravel them one...

No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon—No dawn— No sky—no earthly view— No distance looking blue—No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”— No end to any Row— No indications where the Crescents go— No top to any steeple—No recognitions of familiar people— No courtesies for showing ’em— No knowing ’em!No traveling at all—no locomotion,No inkling of...

There are many differing viewpoints on nature versus nurture, and there are those who believe that bad behavior can be excused and understood if a person doesn’t know better. The theory that someone who has been abused as a child will go on to abuse their own children, and so on, because they don’t know...

God Made Nature, Nature Need Friends.

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the ‘anticipation of Nature,’ that is, by the invention of...

You are nature. You are already perfect, peaceful, and powerful. You don’t need to become anything. You simply need to remember yourself.

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It’s a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it’s even better if the adult and child learn about...

I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There...

Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the starry sky. They were the notes of Oak´s flute. It came from the direction of a small dark object under the hedge – a shephard´s hut – now presenting an outline to which an unintiated person might have been...

Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of...