We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in...

Look, look,’ cried the count, seizing the young man’s hands – “look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the...

live like a king

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.

While the government is “studying” and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on...

While we are actually subjected to them, the ‘moods’ and ‘spirits’ of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must...

C’est la nature avant tout qui doit nous inspirer car elle est la seule garante véritable de notre pérennité. Sans elle, aucun projet n’est assuré d’un lendemain.

I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they...

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...

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.To want more is to...

Humankind has not learned about balance, let alone practiced it. It is guided by greed and ambition, steered by fear. In this way it will eventually destroy itself. But nature will survive; at least the...

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

Zihnimde ki dünya ile dışarıda ki dünya bir değil, ya bir uykumda başka dünya ya uyandım. “burası benim tabiatım değil” Ya da gerçekler rol değiştirmiş inanması kolay değil.

Having commodified nature, we’re eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb.

As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, ’till he returns to them again.

I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature, Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire. . ....

If I replace the word God with the word nature, I am far more at ease with the whole religious enterprise.

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement – plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn...

This far north the sun was still up, although very low, riding through the mountains as if looking for something it lost on the ground.

…all his thoughts were of how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music, and how pleasant it was to look forward to...

They lay on their heathery beds and listened to all the sounds of the night. They heard the little grunt of a hedgehog going by. They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the...

With nature on your side, you don’t need numbers, you don’t need financing and you certainly don’t need to make friends with people you should be fightingagainst.

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn’t work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly...

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river’s edge; around them eight hundred species...

You’re talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I’m talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever.

And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word ‘natural.’ This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God...

What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them.

I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the...

The beauty in the genome is of course that it’s so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data…which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire...

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was – a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces – and he needed days of repose to see...

Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild,...

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALLWhen he is born, a baby’s head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes...

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field’s forces [become] what we call very...

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them...

In nature there is no death, Only a reshuffling of atoms.

If the private life of the sea could ever be transposed onto paper, it would talk not about rivers or rain or glaciers or of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen, but of the millions of...

Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white,...

There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true...

I glimpsed the contour of a wide river, its surface glittering white. Dead trees haunted its edges, their limbs stretching skywards, as if begging for forgiveness

Spiders don’t chew. They send a special liquid into their prey. The prey’s insides turn to mush. Then the spider sucks up its tasty lunch!

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word “abundance,” automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth’s resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually...

Humans are the unrivaled plague the nature has even seen.

How thin the air felt at the forest’s edge, how ghostly the trees that guarded their realm…. The whole world seemed as delicate as a dandelion seed, and as fleeting…. How sad to know that...